I returned
while you were absent."

"For a day, as I was told?"

"My plans must change now of necessity--my trip to Italy--"

"Why?" he asked. "Nothing that has happened need interfere with any of
your plans, your mode of living. My mother would not wish that."

She broke forth then, the color surging up into her face. "Why are you
so unjust to me? Did I suggest that you neglect your mother? You could
not expect me to take your place."

"No--" he spoke sadly. "No, I could not expect that. Believe me, please,
when I say that I put blame on no one but myself. Money--that has been
the main thing in life. Money, and more money. There was always need for
all I could make." His eyes swept her lovely gown; the costly cape
across her arm. Thought, much money, much time had gone into building
her perfect completeness. "No. A man cannot expect another, even a wife,
to fulfill his sacred obligations."

Perhaps the thought came to her that a wife need not ask so much, ask so
demandingly that a man must yield his finest dreams, his every hour to
fulfill her wishes. The color deepened and deepened in her cheek.
Perhaps she remembered their first months together when in the grayest
days he saw color, because they belonged one to the other.

They had both forgotten Graham. She looked at the boy now. He stood
regarding her with that strange aloofness in his eyes, that sharp
question. She felt all at once very lonely.

For Graham, she knew, was estranged from her! And now she knew that she
desired most of all his love in all its purity. Her social strivings,
her desire for leadership balanced against Graham's former worshipful,
chivalrous love for her, dwindled to a pitiful insignificance.

And with the value of her child's love, she suddenly realized the older
mother's longings--the one who had just gone on. An old mother--in her
full years mourning for the child she had borne, nursed, and succored.
Grieving, that in his manhood he had gone from her; that he had
seemingly forgotten in his feverish striving after wealth the lessons
she had sought to teach him.

Was the wife to blame for this? But some stern sense of justice derided
her efforts to exculpate herself. She remembered how she had held the
power to influence him in the early days of their marriage; he had
believed so wonderfully in the whiteness of her ideals. He was malleable
material in her fingers.

But above and beyond his love she had put wealth and fine posi