answer his questions, or even to think. His mind seemed
to go blank till as he tramped down the street he came again to the
consciousness that he was speaking inwardly.

"Damn her! Damn her! She's nothing to me any more."

He was shocked, but he repeated the imprecation. He repeated it because
it shocked him. It struck at what he held to be most sacred. It profaned
his holy of holies, and left it bare to sacrilege. It gave him a fierce,
perverted joy to feel that she whom he would have loved to shield with
everything that was most tender was now exposed to his cursing. It was
rifling his own sanctuary and trampling its treasures in the streets.

He had never had a sanctuary but in her. Other people's temples were to
him not so much objects of contempt as of dim, vague astonishment. Such
words as righteousness and sacrament and Saviour had no place in his
speech. Edith had been the holiest thing he knew. She was both shrine
and goddess. Now that the shrine had been proven empty, and the goddess
irrevocably flown, he got an impious satisfaction from battering down
the altars and blaspheming the deity to whom they had been raised.

"Damn her! Damn her!"

He repeated the curse at intervals till he reached his rooms, the
hateful rooms that he rarely visited at this hour of the day. He was
not, however, thinking of their hatefulness now, as he had come with an
intention.

There was a fire laid in the fireplace, and he lighted it. When it was
crackling sufficiently he drew Edith's photograph from its frame and,
after gazing at it long and bitterly, tossed it into the blaze. He
watched it blister and writhe as though it had been a living thing. The
flame seized on it slowly and unwillingly, biting at the edges in a
curling wreath of blue, and eating its way inward only by degrees. But
it ate its way. It ate its way till the whole lovely person
disappeared--first the hands, and then the bosom, and then the throat
and the features. The sweet eyes still gazed up at him when everything
else was gone.

He had hoped to get relief by this bit of ritual, but none came. When
that which had been the semblance of his wife was no more than a little
swollen rectangle of black ash, and the fire itself was dying down, he
threw himself into a chair.

The reaction was not long in setting in. It set in with a voice that
might have come from without, but which he nevertheless recognized as
his own:

"You fool! Oh, you fool! What diffe