ugh he had brought into
the room, marshalled behind him, all the horrors of her marriage, and she
marvelled and shuddered anew at the thought of the years of that
sufferance.

"Well, I'm back," he said, "and we've made a great killing, as I wrote
you. They were easier than I expected."

He came forward for the usual perfunctory kiss, but she recoiled, and it
was then that his eye seemed to grasp the significance of her travelling
suit and veil, and he glanced at her face.

"What's up? Where are you going?" he demanded. "Has anything happened?"

"Everything," she said, and it was then, suddenly, that she felt the
store of her resolution begin to ebb, and she trembled. "Howard, I am
going away."

He stopped short, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his checked
trousers.

"Going away," he repeated. "Where?"

"I don't know," said Honora; "I'm going away."

As though to cap the climax of tragedy, he smiled as he produced his
cigarette case. And she was swept, as it were, by a scarlet flame that
deprived her for the moment of speech.

"Well," he said complacently, "there's no accounting for women. A case of
nerves--eh, Honora? Been hitting the pace a little too hard, I guess." He
lighted a match, blissfully unaware of the quality of her look. "All of
us have to get toned up once in a while. I need it myself. I've had to
drink a case of Scotch whiskey out West to get this deal through. Now
what's the name of that new boat with everything on her from a cafe to a
Stock Exchange? A German name."

"I don't know," said Honora. She had answered automatically.

To the imminent peril of one of the frailest of Mrs. Forsythe's chairs,
he sat down on it, placed his hands on his knees, flung back his head,
and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. Still she stared at him, as in a
state of semi-hypnosis.

"Instead of going off to one of those thousand-dollar-a-minute doctors,
let me prescribe for you," he said. "I've handled some nervous men in my
time, and I guess nervous women aren't much different. You've had these
little attacks before, and they blow over--don't they? Wing owes me a
vacation. If I do say it myself, there are not five men in New York who
would have pulled off this deal for him. Now the proposition I was going
to make to you is this: that we get cosey in a cabin de luxe on that
German boat, hire an automobile on the other side, and do up Europe. It's
a sort of a handicap never to have been over there."