ming presumption of common sense and common
experience against such a notion made it seem childish folly to
entertain it.

At the station was to be sent the dispatch, the reply to which would
determine Mary's fate and his own. Pinney signed it, so that, if the
worst were true, Lansing's existence might still remain a secret; for of
going back to her in that case, to make her a sharer of his shame, there
was no thought on his part. The dispatch was addressed to Mr. Davenport,
Mary's minister, and merely asked if the wedding had taken place.

They had to wait two hours for the answer. When it came, Lansing was
without on the platform, and Pinney was in the office. The operator
mercifully shortened his suspense by reading the purport of the message
from the tape: "The dispatch in answer to yours says that the wedding
did not take place."

Pinney sprang out upon the platform. At sight of Lansing's look of
ghastly questioning, the tears blinded him, and he could not speak, but
the wild exultation of his face and gestures was speech enough.

The second day following, Lansing clasped his wife to his breast,
and this is the story she told him, interrupted with weepings and
shudderings and ecstatic embraces of reassurance. The reasons which had
determined her, in disregard of the dictates of her own heart, to marry
again, have been sufficiently intimated in her letter to Mrs. Pinney.
For the rest, Mr. Whitcomb was a highly respectable man, whom she
esteemed and believed to be good and worthy. When the hour set for the
marriage arrived, and she took her place by his side before the minister
and the guests, her heart indeed was like lead, but her mind calm and
resolved. The preliminary prayer was long, and it was natural, as it
went on, that her thoughts should go back to the day when she had thus
stood by another's side. She had ado to crowd back the scalding tears,
as she contrasted her present mood of resignation with the mingling of
virginal timidity and the abandon of love in her heart that other day.
Suddenly, seeming to rise out of this painful contrast of the past
and the present, a feeling of abhorrence for the act to which she was
committed possessed her mind. She had all along shrunk from it, as any
sensitive woman might from a marriage without love, but there had
been nothing in that shrinking to compare in intensity with this
uncontrollable aversion which now seized upon her to the idea of holding
a wife's relatio