e influential members of its staff, and he could
not guess that he counted an enemy among them. He had dined with the
editor a week before at the same club-table, and had found him not less
cordial than he had ever been before.

'I suppose the man is justified,' Paul thought when the power of
reflection returned to him. 'The whole story is on its way to the public
ears, and neither he nor any other man can stop it It's his business to
be first in the field with it if he can.'

He turned his cab homeward, for he had no heart to face the people he
had meant to meet, and on his way, just to gratify the natural instinct
of self-torture, he bought a copy of the journal, and read there that
Messrs. Berry and Smythe, the well-known firm of solicitors in Lincoln's
Inn, had that day filed a petition for divorce against Mr. Paul
Armstrong, the well-known dramatist, and that remarkable revelations
were expected.

For these past few years home had seemed Paradise. He had never for any
fraction of an instant wavered in his love, and use and wont had helped
to set a seal of sanctity upon it With the passage of the months and
years, with the growth of many intimate acquaintanceships, and not a few
closer and dearer ties about him, home had grown to be as sacred to
him as if the union on which it was founded had been blessed by all
the priests of all the churches. No purer and more tranquil spirit of
affectionate loyalty had breathed in any home in England, and now the
balm of his soul was vitriol, and that which had been the bread of life
to him was steeped in gall and wormwood. The very honest purpose of his
life, his constant and sober pursuit of a worthy fame, recoiled upon him
here as if it had been in itself a crime. Not to have striven, to have
been content with a dull obscurity of fortune, to have wasted his days
in idleness and his nights in foolish revel, would have seemed a happier
course to him. And as it was the better part of life which chastised
him most cruelly, so it was the best and worthiest affection he had ever
known which turned upon him with a cup of poison in its hand and bade
him drink it to the dregs. Life and the world are so made that only
the most desolate can suffer by themselves. If by any trick of magic he
could have borne his chastisement alone, he would have accepted it with
something like a scorn of fate.

He had discharged his cab within a hundred yards of home, and had read
the stinging paragrap