turned his face into his work, "Well, wouldn't that get
you!"

The conversation went no further. Neither could have said what he saw.
But there is something in every human creature--a survival of our jungle
days, which lets our eyes see more than our consciousness records in
language. And these men, who saw Markley and the woman, could not have
defined the canine impression which he gave them. Yet it was there. The
volcano was beginning to smoke.

It was a month later before the town saw the flames. During that time
John Markley had been walking to and from his midday dinner with Isabel
Hobart, had been helping her on and off with her wraps in the office,
and had been all but kicking up the dirt behind him and barking around
her, as the clerks there told us, without causing comment. An honest man
always has such a long start when he runs away from himself that no one
misses him until he is beyond extradition. Matters went along thus for
nearly a year before the woman in the cottage on Exchange Street knew
how they stood. And that speaks well of our town; for we are not a mean
town, and if anyone ever had our sympathy it was Mrs. Markley, as she
went about her quiet ways, giving her missionary teas, looking after the
poor of her church, making her famous doughnuts for the socials, doing
her part at the Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, digging her club paper
out of the encyclopaedia, and making over her black silk the third time
for every day. If John Markley was cross with her in that time--and the
neighbours say that he was; if he sat for hours in the house without
saying a word, and grumbled and flew into a rage at the least ruffling
of the domestic waters--his wife kept her grief to herself, and even
when she left town to visit her daughter in California no one knew what
she knew.

A month passed, two months passed, and John Markley's name had become a
by-word and a hissing. Three months passed, a year went by, and still
the wife did not return. And then one day Ab Handy, who sometimes
prepared John Markley's abstracts, came into our office and whispered to
the man at the desk that there was a little paper filed in the court
which, under the circumstances, Mr. Markley would rather we would say as
little about as is consistent with our policy in such cases. Handy
didn't say what it was, and backed out bowing and eating dirt, and we
sent a boy hot-foot to the court-house to find out what had been filed.
The boy cam