rence does this make to your love for
her? You know you love her, and that you will never cease loving her,
and that what you envy her is--the child."

What you envy her is--the child! He pondered on this. It was like an
accusation. The admission of it--when admission came--was the point of
departure in his heart of a new conscious yearning.

IV

DANGER

It was what he had been afraid of on and off for seven years. The wonder
was that it hadn't happened before. But, since it had not happened, he
had got out of the way of expecting it. The fear of it used to dog him
whenever he went to the theater or the opera or out to dine. There had
been minutes in Fifth Avenue, or Bond Street, or the Rue de la Paix, as
the case might be, when, at the sight of a feather or a scarf or
something familiar in a way of walking, his heart and brain seemed to
stop their function. He had known himself to stand stock-still,
searching wildly for the easy, casual phrases he had prepared--for the
purpose of carrying off such a meeting as this, if ever it occurred,
only to find that he was mistaken--that it was some one else.

There had been two or three years like that, two or three years in which
they had often been in the same city, perhaps under the same roof; but
he had never so much as caught a glimpse of her. In the earlier months
that had been a relief. He couldn't have seen her and kept his
self-control. He could follow the routine of life only by a system he
had invented--a system for shutting her out of his thought, that the
sight of her would have wrecked.

Then had come another period in which he felt he could have committed
infamies just to see her getting in or out of a carriage, or lunching in
a restaurant, or buying something in a shop. There were whole seasons
when he knew she was in New York from autumn to spring; and, though he
haunted all the places where women who keep in the movement are likely
to be found, he never saw her.

He knew he could have discovered her plans and followed her; but he
wouldn't do that. Besides, he didn't want to meet her in such a way as
to be obliged to speak to her. He wouldn't have known what to say, or by
what name to call her. Such an encounter would have annoyed her and made
him grotesque. It was more than he asked. He would have been satisfied
with a glimpse of her gloved hand or her veiled face as she drove in
the Park or the Avenue. But he never got it.

After he married, t