he
seemed to have got nearer to him than in the more intimate relations of
married life.

"Is--is that all you have to say to me, Shiel?" she asked, with a
swelling note of feeling in her voice; while there was also emerging in
her look an elusive pride which might quickly become sharp indignation.
That her deserter should greet her so after five years of such offence
to a woman's self-respect, as might entitle her to become a rebel
against matrimony, was too cruel to be borne. This feeling suddenly
became alive in her, in spite of a joy in her heart different from that
which she had ever known; in defiance of the fact that now that they
were together once more, what would she not do to prevent their being
driven apart again!

"After abandoning me for five years, is that all you have to say to me,
Shiel? After I have suffered before the world--"

He threw up his arms with a passionate gesture. "The world!" he
exclaimed--"the devil take the world! I've been out of it for five
years, and well out of it. What do I care for the world!"

She drew herself up in a spirit of defence. "It isn't what you care
for the world, but I had to live in it--alone, and because I was alone,
eyebrows were lifted. It has been easy enough for you. You were where no
one knew you. You had your freedom"--she advanced to the table, and, as
though unconsciously, he did the same, and they gazed at each other over
the white linen and its furnishings--"and no one was saying that your
wife had left you for this or that, because of her bad conduct or of
yours. Either way it was not what was fair and just; yet I had to bear
and suffer, not you. There is no pain like it. There I was in misery
and--"

A bitter smile came to his lips. "A woman can endure a good deal when
she has all life's luxuries in her grasp. Did you ever think, Mona, that
a man must suffer when he goes out into a world where he knows no one,
penniless, with no trade, no profession, nothing except his own helpless
self? He might have stayed behind among the luxuries that belonged to
another, and eaten from the hand of his wife's charity, but"--(all the
pride and pain of the old situation rose up in him, impelled by the
brooding of the years of separation, heightened by the fact that he was
no nearer to his goal of financial independence of her than he was when
he left London five years before)--"but do you think, no matter what
I've done, broken a pledge or not, been in the wrong a