ess than actual alarm.

The room had become cold with the dying out of the dining-room fire that
warmed the drum. She would go to bed. She nevertheless arranged the room
again with a singular impression that she was doing it for the last time
in her present existing circumstances, and placing the lamp on the table
in the hall, went up to her own room. By the light of a single candle
she undressed herself hastily, said her prayers punctiliously, and got
into bed, with an unexpected relief at finding herself still occupying
it alone. Then she fell asleep and dreamed of Demorest.

CHAPTER IV

When Edward Blandford found himself alone after his wife had undertaken
to fulfil his abandoned filial duty at her parents' house, he felt a
slight twinge of self-reproach. He could not deny that this was not
the first time he had evaded the sterile Sabbath evenings at his
mother-in-law's, or that even at other times he was not in accord with
the cold and colorless sanctity of the family. Yet he remembered that
when he picked out from the budding womanhood of North Liberty
this pure, scentless blossom, he had endured the privations of its
surroundings with a sense of security in inhaling the atmosphere in
which it grew, and knowing the integrity of its descent. There was a
certain pleasure also in invading this seclusion with human passion; the
first pressure of her hand when they were kneeling together at family
prayers had the zest without the sin of a forbidden pleasure; the first
kiss he had given her with their heads over the family Bible had fairly
intoxicated him in the thin, rarefied air of their surroundings. In
transplanting this blossom to his own home with the fond belief that it
would eventually borrow the hues and color of his own passion, he had
no further interest in the house he had left behind. When he found,
however, that the ancestral influence was stronger than he expected,
that the young wife, instead of assimilating to his conditions, had
imported into their little household the rigors of her youthful home,
he had been chilled and disappointed. But he could not help also
remembering that his own boyhood had been spent in an atmosphere like
her own in everything but its sincerity and deep conviction. His father
had recognized the business value of placating the narrow tyranny of the
respectable well-to-do religious community, and had become a conscious
hypocrite and a popular citizen. He had himself bee