ank amazement, of
mingled remembrance and stark realisation. This was a turn of affairs
for which he had made no calculation. There had ever been the question
of his return to her, but never of her coming to him. Yet here she was,
debonnaire and fresh and perfectly appointed--and ah, so terribly neat
and spectacularly finessed! Here she was with all that expert formality
which, in the old days, had been a reproach to his loosely-swung life
and person, to his careless, almost slovenly but well-brushed, cleanly,
and polished ease--not like his wife, as though he had been poured out
of a mould and set up to dry. He was not tailor-made, and she had ever
been so exact that it was as though she had been crystallised, clothes
and all--a perfect crystal, yet a crystal. It was this very perfection,
so charming to see, but in a sense so inhuman, which had ever dismayed
him. "What should I be doing in the home of an angel!" he had exclaimed
to himself in the old home at Lammis.

Truth is, he ought never to have had such a feeling, and he would not
have had it, if she had diffused the radiance of love, which would have
made her outer perfectness mere slovenliness beside her inner charm and
magnetism. Very little of all this passed through Crozier's mind, as
with confused vision he looked at her. He had borne the ordeal of the
witness-box in the Logan Trial with superb coolness; he had been in
physical danger over and over again, and had kept his head; he had never
been faced by a human being who embarrassed him--except his own wife.
"There is no fear like that of one's own wife," was the saying of an
ancient philosopher, and Crozier had proved it true; not because
of errors committed, but because he was as sensitive as a girl of
sensibility; because he felt that his wife did not understand him, and
he was ever in fear of doing the wrong thing, while eager beyond telling
to please her. After all, during the past five years, parted from her
while loving her, there had still been a feeling of relief unexplainable
to himself in not having to think whether he was pleasing her or not,
or to reproach himself constantly that he was failing to conform to her
standard.

"How did you come--why? How did you know?" he asked helplessly, as
she made no motion to come nearer; as she kept looking at him with an
expression in her eyes wholly unfamiliar to him. Yet it was not wholly
unfamiliar, for it belonged to the days when he courted her, when s