nce, the threatened helplessness _must_ appeal to any
man! How can he, then, fail to stand by a person in trouble--a person
linked to him by every tie, every obligation. Why--why to fail at such a
time is dastardly--and to--to make a possible threatened infirmity a
reason for abandoning a woman is monstrous--!"

"Phil! I never for a moment supposed that even if you suspected Alixe to
be not perfectly responsible you would have abandoned her--"

"_I?_ Abandon _her!_" He laughed bitterly. "I was not speaking of
myself," he said. . . . And to himself he wondered: "Was it
_that_--after all? Is that the key to my dreadful inability to
understand? I cannot--I cannot accept it. I know her; it was not that;
it--it must not be!"

And that night he wrote to her:

"If he threatens you with divorce on such a ground he himself is
likely to be adjudged mentally unsound. It was a brutal, stupid
threat, nothing more; and his insult to your father's memory was
more brutal still. Don't be stampeded by such threats. Disprove
them by your calm self-control under provocation; disprove them by
your discretion and self-confidence. Give nobody a single possible
reason for gossip. And above all, Alixe, don't become worried and
morbid over anything you might dread as inheritance, for you are as
sound to-day as you were when I first met you; and you shall not
doubt that you could ever be anything else. Be the woman you can
be! Show the pluck and courage to make the very best out of life. I
have slowly learned to attempt it; and it is not difficult if you
convince yourself that it can be done."

To this she answered the next day:

"I will do my best. There is danger and treachery everywhere; and
if it becomes unendurable I shall put an end to it in one way or
another. As for his threat--incident on my admitting that I did go
to your room, and defying him to dare believe evil of me for doing
it--I can laugh at it now--though, when I wrote you, I was
terrified--remembering how mentally broken my father was when he
died.

"But, as you say, I _am_ sound, body and mind. I _know_ it; I don't
doubt it for one moment--except--at long intervals when, apropos of
nothing, a faint sensation of dread comes creeping.

"But I am _sound_! I know it so absolutely that I sometimes wonder
at my own perfect sanity and understanding; an