sn't your father. I didn't see him.
No--it was my sister. She's never seen you, but all the same she knew
enough to give me points. She told me I was a fool to suppose you were
happy here."

"How clever of her!" A certain bantering smile accompanied the words,
but on the instant it faded away. She went on with a musing gravity.
"I'm sorry I don't get to know your sister. She seems an extremely real
sort of person. I can understand that she might be difficult to live
with--I daresay all genuine characters are--but she's very real.
Although, apparently, conversation isn't her strong point, still I enjoy
talking with her."

"How do you mean?" Thorpe asked, knitting his brows in puzzlement.

"Oh, I often go to her shop--or did when I was in town. I went almost
immediately after our--our return to England. I was half afraid
she would recognize me--the portraits in the papers, you know--but
apparently she didn't. And it's splendid--the way she says absolutely
nothing more than it's necessary to say. And her candour! If she thinks
books are bad she says so. Fancy that!"

He still frowned uneasily as he looked down at her. "You never mentioned
to me that you had gone there," he told her, as if in reproach.

"Ah, it was complicated," Edith explained. "She objects to knowing me--I
think secretly I respect her a great deal for that--and therefore there
is something clandestine about my getting to know her--and I could not
be sure how it would impress you, and really it seemed simplest not to
mention it."

"It isn't that alone," he declared, grave-faced still, but with a softer
voice. "Do you remember what I said the other day? It would make all the
difference in the world to me, if--if you were really--actually my other
half!"

The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon the air, to
impregnate it with some benumbing quality. The husband and wife looked
dumbly, almost vacantly at one another, for what appeared a long time.

"I mean"--all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort of fluency as
he progressed--"I mean, if you shared things really with me! Oh, I'm
not complaining; you mustn't think that. The agreement we made at the
start--you've kept your part of it perfectly. You've done better than
that: you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy."

"Oh no," she interposed, gently. "It is not the fact that it has made me
unhappy."

"Well--discontented, then," he resumed, without pause. "He