at companionship lost to her, she began to feel, as she had
never done before, the limitations of her marriage. Her nervous
restlessness increased and sharpened to a positive hunger which Ted's
affection and compassion were powerless to alleviate. In her loss and
sorrow he could do nothing for her, earnestly as he tried. It was as
if he could not reach her, and she realized it with amazement. If he
had not compelled from her the greatest passion of which she was
capable, he had certainly won love of a kind from her, love warm and
sincere, and their life together had bound her to him with such ties of
loyalty and habit and common experience, with such dear memories of
young tenderness and joy, that she had never doubted the completeness
of their union. That he could not reach her now, that he could bring
no peace to her in her trouble, seemed to her unexplainable--until she
recalled the fact that he and Mrs. Caldwell, though fond of each other,
had not been really near each other in spirit. Theirs had been a
pleasant, light affection, an amiable, surface relation, bred of the
accident of their connection rather than of any genuine attraction
between them. Remembering this, Sheila assured herself of its being
the reason that Ted could not comfort her for Mrs. Caldwell's death.
There was so much in her grandmother that he had never seen, so much of
which he could not speak at all.

Peter, on the other hand, had been almost as dear to her grandmother as
she herself had been--almost as dear and quite as near. He had a
thousand sweet and intimate memories of Mrs. Caldwell, and he suffered,
in the loss of her, a grief akin to Sheila's own. So to Peter she
turned. With the perfect unconsciousness of self that a child might
have shown, she made her demands upon him, upon his pity, upon his
time; and if he did not come often to see her, she sent for him.

She was really strangely unworldly, and in this renewed comradeship
with her old friend, she saw nothing for anyone to criticize. Neither
did she recognize in it any danger for Peter or herself. Peter had
always been there in her life, an accepted and unexciting fact. She
did not allow for change in him or herself in the ten years of her
marriage, years during which they had met hut seldom and casually. She
had simply resumed the way of her girlhood, her childhood, with him,
never considering that it might now be surcharged with peril for them;
never for an instan