ay to me?" he asked with quivering lips.

"What would you have me say?"

"Anything would be better than this coldness--this avoidance of all that
is most vital to us both. Even if you raved and stormed, I could stand
it better, for I might have a chance to explain. Things are not as bad
as you think."

"They are bad enough for me!" she returned calmly, her lovely profile
and the lowered sweep of her eyelashes, her straight carriage and the
gentle curve of her bosom, outlined against the dark hangings of the
window.

"Will you listen to me for a bit?"

"I would rather not."

"Then you condemn me outright?"

"You have condemned yourself."

"You cannot have forgotten my love for you?" he cried desperately.

She turned and lifted grave, blue eyes to his face in mute condemnation.

"You do not understand--I have been ill--I don't seem to have been
myself for a long time, I--I--it seemed to me that you did not care a
farthing what became of me. You left it to me to cable if I wanted you
when you should have known that I was yearning for nothing so much as a
sight of your face. It was pointed out to me that any woman with a spark
of true love for her own man, would have let nothing stand in the way of
her joining him the moment she heard of his illness. Did you?" He
laughed harshly. "No! It was the old story, 'Baby,' and always, 'Baby!'
God!--you never cared."

"I cared so much, that I never wanted to amuse myself with another man
though I had plenty of opportunities." Yet, his passionate denunciation
had gone home.

"Joyce, am I to have no chance?"

With a gesture of disgust, she dismissed the subject peremptorily, and
passed out of the sitting-room, trembling with emotion from head to
foot.

In the adjoining apartment, which was his bedroom, she struggled with
the straps of her fibre trunk till they were taken out of her hands and
the leathers unbuckled, by her husband who had followed her in. Joyce
watched him with a pain at her heart as he bent over his task. A lump
came into her throat too big to swallow. She felt choked with a rising
hysteria which only a great effort of will controlled. He looked so
handsome, so like the lover-husband she had known, that it was all she
could do not to fling herself into his arms and say "Let us forget
everything and remember only our love!" Her natural place was in his
arms now that she had come out all that distance to be with him;
instead, they had not even exchange