," I said, "you
are forgetting what is due to me as your wife. You were fed at six. Go
back."

He went. But yet I felt more and more that his love must be dwindling to
make him act as he did. I thought it all over wearily enough and asked
myself whether I had done everything I should to hold my husband's love.
I had kept him in at nights. I had cut down his smoking. I had stopped
his playing cards. What more was there that I could do?

* * * * *

So at last the conviction came to me that I must go away. I felt that I
must get away somewhere and think things out. At first I thought of Palm
Beach, but the season had not opened and I felt somehow that I couldn't
wait. I wanted to get away somewhere by myself and just face things as
they were. So one morning I said to John, "John, I think I'd like to go
off somewhere for a little time, just to be by myself, dear, and I don't
want you to ask to come with me or to follow me, but just let me go."
John said, "All right, Minn. When are you going to start?" The cold
brutality of it cut me to the heart, and I went upstairs and had a good
cry and looked over steamship and railroad folders. I thought of Havana
for a while, because the pictures of the harbour and the castle and the
queer Spanish streets looked so attractive, but then I was afraid that
at Havana a woman alone by herself might be simply persecuted by
attentions from gentlemen. They say the Spanish temperament is something
fearful. So I decided on Bermuda instead. I felt that in a beautiful,
quiet place like Bermuda I could think everything all over and face
things, and it said on the folder that there were always at least two
English regiments in garrison there, and the English officers, whatever
their faults, always treat a woman with the deepest respect.

So I said nothing more to John, but in the next few days I got all my
arrangements made and my things packed. And when the last afternoon came
I sat down and wrote John a long letter, to leave on my boudoir table,
telling him that I had gone to Bermuda. I told him that I wanted to be
alone: I said that I couldn't tell when I would be back--that it might
be months, or it might be years, and I hoped that he would try to be as
happy as he could and forget me entirely, and to send me money on the
first of every month.

* * * * *

Well, it was just at that moment that one of those strange coincidences
h