."

At this the tumult and catastrophe of her emotion fused into a white
hot, illogical anger against this man who was suffering, and by his
suffering made her suffer.

"Your wife? Yours?" She smiled hatefully. "The wife of the son of a
quack? You do yourself too much honor, Hal Surtaine."

"I fear that I did you too much honor," he replied quietly.

Suffocation pressed upon her throat as she saw him go to the door. For a
moment the wild desire to hold him, to justify herself, to explain, even
to ask forgiveness, seized her. Bitterly she fought it down, and so
stood, with wide eyes and smiling lips. At the door he turned to look,
with a glance less of appeal than of incredulity that she, so lovely, so
alluring, so desirable beyond all the world, a creature of springtime
and promise embowered amidst the springtime and promise of the
apple-bloom, could be such as her speech and action proclaimed her.

Hal carried from her house, like a barbed arrow, the memory of that
still and desperate smile.

CHAPTER XVII

REPRISALS

Working on an empty heart is almost as severe a strain as the less
poetic process of working on an empty stomach. On the morning after the
failure of Esme's strategy and the wrecking of Hal's hopes, the young
editor went to his office with a languid but bitter distaste for its
demands. The first item in the late afternoon mail stung him to a fitter
spirit, as a sharp blow will spur to his best efforts a courageous
boxer. This was a packet, containing the crumbled fragments of a spray
of arbutus, and a note in handwriting now stirringly familiar.

I have read your editorial. From a man dishonest enough to print
deliberate lies and cowardly enough to attack a woman, it is just
such an answer as I might have expected.

ELEANOR S.M. ELLIOT.

At first the reference to the editorial bewildered Hal. Then he
remembered. Esme had known nothing of the editorial until she read it in
the paper. She had inferred that he wrote it after leaving her, thus
revenging himself upon her by further scarification of the friend for
whom she had pleaded. To the charge of deliberate mendacity he had no
specific clue, not knowing that Kathleen Pierce had denied the
authenticity of the interview. He mused somberly upon the venomed
injustice of womankind. The note and its symbol of withered sweetness he
buried in his waste-basket. If he could but discard as readily the
vision of a face, strangely