processes. But his personal life had
been singularly free of storms. Even his emotional upheaval, when he had
fallen completely in love for the first time, had lacked that torment of
uncertainty which might have played a certain havoc, for a time, with
those quick unalterable decisions of the business hour; and even his
engagement had only lasted a month.

It was true that during the past six months he had worried off and on
about the shadow that had fallen upon his wife's spirits and affected his
own, but, when he had had time to think of it, before yesterday morning,
he had assumed it was due to some phase of feminine psychology which he
had never mastered. That she could be interested in another man never had
crossed his mind, in spite of his passing flare of jealousy. She was
still passionately in love with, him, for all her vagaries--or so he had
thought--

Ruyler was conscious of a riotous confusion of mind that really made him
apprehensive. Had he witnessed that scene on the dummy--this
afternoon?--it seemed a long while ago--had he heard those portentous
words of his mother-in-law to his wife?--had they meant that she had
warned her daughter against the bad blood in her veins, extracted a
promise--broken!--to walk in the narrow way of the dutiful
wife--mercifully spared by a fortunate marriage the terrible temptations
of the older woman's youth? Had Helene confessed ... in desperate need of
help, advice? ... Doremus was just the bounder to compromise a woman and
then blackmail her.... Good God! What _was_ it?

For all his mental turmoil he realized that here alone was the only
possible menace to his life's happiness. His mother-in-law's past was a
bitter pill for a proud man to swallow, and there was even the
possibility of his wife's illegitimacy, but, after all, those were
matters belonging to the past, and the past quickly receded to limbo
these days.

Even an open scandal, if some one of the offal sheets of San Francisco
got hold of the story and published it, would be forgotten in time. But
this--if his wife had fallen in love with another man--and women had no
discrimination where love was concerned--(if a decent chap got a lovely
girl it was mainly by luck; the rotters got just as good)--then indeed he
was in the midst of disaster without end. The present was chaos and the
future a blank. He'd enlist in the first war and get himself shot....

Helene had a charming light coquetry, wholly French, and s