y of her impulses, and above
all for the automatic influences of habit.

Knowing that she did not keep early hours he delayed till ten o'clock to
present himself at her sitting-room door, but the maid who answered his
knock informed him that Mrs. Amherst was not yet up.

His reply that he would wait did not appear to hasten the leisurely
process of her toilet, and he had the room to himself for a full
half-hour. Many months had passed since he had spent so long a time in
it, and though habitually unobservant of external details, he now found
an outlet for his restlessness in mechanically noting the intimate
appurtenances of Bessy's life. He was at first merely conscious of a
soothing harmony of line and colour, extending from the blurred tints of
the rug to the subdued gleam of light on old picture-frames and on the
slender flanks of porcelain vases; but gradually he began to notice how
every chair and screen and cushion, and even every trifling utensil on
the inlaid writing-desk, had been chosen with reference to the whole
composition, and to the minutest requirements of a fastidious leisure. A
few months ago this studied setting, if he had thought of it at all,
would have justified itself as expressing the pretty woman's natural
affinity with pretty toys; but now it was the cost of it that struck
him. He was beginning to learn from Bessy's bills that no commodity is
taxed as high as beauty, and the beauty about him filled him with sudden
repugnance, as the disguise of the evil influences that were separating
his wife's life from his.

But with her entrance he dismissed the thought, and tried to meet her as
if nothing stood in the way of their full communion. Her hair, still wet
from the bath, broke from its dryad-like knot in dusky rings and spirals
threaded with gold, and from her loose flexible draperies, and her whole
person as she moved, there came a scent of youth and morning freshness.
Her beauty touched him, and made it easier for him to humble himself.

"I was stupid and disagreeable last night. I can never say what I want
when I have to count the minutes, and I've come back now for a quiet
talk," he began.

A shade of distrust passed over Bessy's face. "About business?" she
asked, pausing a few feet away from him.

"Don't let us give it that name!" He went up to her and drew her two
hands into his. "You used to call it our work--won't you go back to that
way of looking at it?"

Her hands resisted his