and
watched her ride away. Then he went back into the station just in time
to catch the train.

Shirley found herself perturbed and close to tears; she hardly knew why.

"I wonder what he meant by that about temperament?" She sighed again.
"Sometimes I think the worry and everything are turning David's temper
sour. I wish--I wish he were like other men. He doesn't realize how
trying he is sometimes."

And Shirley being Shirley, she bade Charles drive faster and tried to put
David's unlikeness to other men out of her mind.

David being David, he sat up all night, submitting to his cure for
temperament. He was facing the truth from which he had been hiding ever
since Shirley went away. His heavy sense of loss had been defined.

A little imp with a nasty sneering voice that jabbed like a hot needle
perched itself on his shoulder and kept dinning into his ears:

"The truth is, you had nothing to lose but a fancy. Shirley never really
loved you. You were only one of her toys, one sort of a good time, and
not worth the price. You didn't really love Shirley, only what you
thought she was, what you see now she is not. Therefore . . ."

CHAPTER VII

SANCTUARY

Some men fall out of love with their wives as easily and unconcernedly
as they fell in. They even feel a sort of relief, thinking a
disturbing factor thus removed from their lives, and they live happily
ever after. But they are not "temperamental."

It was not so with David. He thought it a tragedy, at least for a
while. Even when it had failed him, when it had refused to shine in
darkness, itself turned upon him in an hour of need, he had not lost
faith in love. He had said in his heart, "At least I have love left,
which is worth while in itself; and having that, I can yet work out
some sort of happiness for us all." He had clung desperately to that
hope, though the evidence was against it.

He had been clinging to an illusion. When he found that out, he had
nothing left. He was bewildered by the task of working out a happiness
where no love was. How could he rebuild when he had not even wreckage
with which to build?

He went to live at the boarding-house where he had been taking his
meals, a dingy cheerless establishment that had but the one merit of
cheapness. He spent his evenings there alone, smoking too much,
reading or working for Dick Holden. The cheap tobacco burned his
tongue and the loneliness, more than ever, ate into h