WHEN Mrs. Evremond found herself actually in her carriage it seemed to her that it would never go fast enough, although Heaven knows she was indifferent to the speed of her vehicles as a rule, there being no reason why she should hasten—no place she especially cared to arrive at, no excitement or element of it in her quiet life. But this afternoon she was conscious of every rotation of the wheels.

When the Arc de Triomphe had been passed and in and out among automobiles and tramways her little yellow-wheeled brougham crossed the Etoile and began the descent, suddenly, with the inconsequence marking a woman’s emotions as clearly as it stamps her reasonings, Mrs. Evremond decided the coachman was driving at a ridiculous rate. After all, she hoped never to reach the Place de la Concorde—never to traverse the Pont Royal and leave for the Latin Quarter and the other side of the river—the insouciant world of the Bois and American Paris. She had no desire to find the obscure street in which her husband had his studio—which street was, however, the direction she had given her footman, and it was toward No. 15 bis, Passage du Maine, that with such useless speed she was being driven.

They reached and passed the ElysÉe Palace Hotel. Mrs. Evremond blew through the tube at her side, the brougham drew up to the curb, stopped and she got out.

“You may go home. I shall not need you again to-day,” she directed, and, turning to the avenue, she began to walk down the Champs ElysÉes. She might at least be mistress of her own gait; walk with short, feverish little steps or retard her pace to keep harmony with her alternate rapid or halting reflections, for her mind, as she walked, went back over the past six months of her married life with a persistence, a clearness, that denoted how important were the details, how ineffaceable were the marks her experiences had made upon her, how intensely she felt what she had lived, how seriously she had taken life, how absorbed she was in the man to whom she had attached herself—how desperately she loved her husband. The vividness with which she thought of him had the precision of a fresh image. The impulsive rush of herself toward the harbor her conception of him made proved, by its very force and freshness, that thinking of him like this was a new thing. She had lived with him, existed by his side, for six years, and had never thought about him, around him, as she did to-day.

She gasped. “Perhaps if I had thought about him a little more and loved him a little less, this might not have happened!”

The happening, so distressing to her, which had caused her, at an unusual hour, to ring for her carriage, dress and fly from the house on an expedition she knew to be close to ill-breeding in its likeness to melodrama and its distinct opposition to codes of expedient, had been finding a letter—the world-worn story that comes to each woman with a new pang.

As Mrs. Evremond reached the Rond Point, she asked herself: “What am I really going to do? What do I expect to see and find, and how shall I act when I find it?”

Women constantly commit the platitude—if such an expression can be used—of thinking they are acting on certain occasions contrary to their characters, out of gear with their codes. Mrs. Evremond was not an impulsive temperament. Unaccustomed to crises or events that called for the quick decision of more brilliant and self-sufficient minds, she had found herself face to face with a problem, and was acting with a precipitation that made her dizzy, and a promptitude that suggested she had been brought into contact with just such difficulties many times before.

The well-bred gentlewoman had seized, without second thought, the letter lying open at her feet, read it, gasped over it, paled over it, hated and disbelieved it—crushed it in her hand, and, with the now crumpled sheet between glove and palm, she was on her way to verify its purport; to make sure of the fact which women, if they would but know it, are many times happier in ignoring; to prove to herself what? That her husband was unfaithful to her; that she must either “cease to love him”—by the operation of one of those unbalancing coups de foudre which, we are told, turn honey to gall and love to hate in the human breast at one revolution—or that with the discovery she must also acknowledge, no matter what he did, she would love him still, and would, therefore, curse an enlightenment which should only give her a useless bitter grief to suffer for the rest of her life.

She stopped still at the Place de la Concorde. She never walked alone in the streets of Paris at this hour, and the aspect of the city was new to her. In the early winter twilight the Place shone through the mingled mists of evening, and the golden hazy scintillations haloing the yellow lamps. The sunset had left the sky over the Tuileries still red, and above the river the heavens darkened and grew cold, but the bridge lights beckoned. Her hands were in her muff, her cheeks red with exercise, and her eyes, which had wept more tears in the last few hours than they would acknowledge to have seen for many months, stung in the sharp air. She stood irresolute. Behind her the Champs ElysÉes stretched to the apex at the Arc. It would be a quiet, restful walk home. Should she not take it, return and force herself to learn the lesson—that it is folly to be too wise? As she clasped her hands together in her muff the letter crushed upon her palm; she set her lips, drew a sharp breath, and resumed her walk, turning across to the Pont de la Concorde, traversing it quickly, a graceful, agile pedestrian among the many foot passengers, unobserving of the admiring eyes of those whose chase is beauty.

After a very long walk, Mrs. Evremond gained the boulevard she sought, turned into a dark little street, into a still darker alley.

The old concierge met her at the loge, a peasant gardienne, blear-eyed and wearing the white cap of her province. She blinked at madame, and under the thick lace veil Mrs. Evremond had worn to shield her emotion from the curious, the old woman did not recognize her tenant’s wife.

“Monsieur told me that he is expecting madame,” she said, familiarly. “He will not be long. Madame will go in——”

Without reply, she passed the woman and went up to her husband’s room.

Expecting her? No, that she knew was not the case—he was expecting another; even the old portiÈre was in his wretched secret, while she alone, perhaps, of all Paris had been ignorant.

As she crossed the threshold of the studio she seemed to enter the apartment of a perfect stranger, so far away from her the last few hours had served to put him. The room was cold. She opened the door of the little stove, and, finding the fire laid, put a match to the kindling; in a moment the sharp crackling of the wood met her ears with a friendly domestic voice whose language was to her ears cruelly that of the hearth and home. If what the missive implied were true, her husband had loved another woman for many months. He had met her here in this place which the wife looked upon as sacred to his art; whose precincts she had respected with fidelity, believing them devoted to his work, and fearing to be obtrusive.

The studio had indeed been sacred, but to an unlawful love.

Her first impulse was to throw her muff down, unwind the fur from her neck and make herself as comfortable as she could in the gloom of the spacious room; but instead she walked restlessly about, taking in the details of decoration, the attractive disorder, with unseeing eyes. Behind that large screen Maurice’s models dressed and undressed—women of the people, women of the streets, of course, of the lowest, most degrading type; face to face with them, alone with them, he had passed hours of his life with them for years. She had never been jealous of them, she had never thought of them; she had regarded them in the same light with easels, and paint, and studio equipment.

Why had she not been jealous of them? They were women, and if Maurice was so unattached that he was either a prey or a victim, or a seeker of such affairs as this which she now believed she had discovered, why should she not take it for granted that there were many and varied experiences of which she had been the unconscious dupe? She shuddered—anger and distrust whispered her to hate her husband, to despise his weakness and never to forgive him.

In her lonely promenade she peopled the room with incidents and scenes which did her wrong, and proved to what extent she had unnerved herself, what rein she gave to jealousy and fear. She had lighted a lamp, and in its light took out the crumpled piece of paper from her glove and re-read it again. It was a love letter, the warm and confident letter of a woman who loves to the man who loves her. At its close it gave him rendezvous for half-past five o’clock at 11 bis, Passage du Maine.

As Mrs. Evremond’s eyes followed the lines among the wrinkles of the crumpled page, her eyes brimmed over again with tears, her knees trembled, she felt herself actually ready to fall. With the return of her tears came a softening of her anger—a relief of her unnerved state, of her suffering—for a second she wept silently. At the moment when her control was beyond her power she thought she heard a sound on the stairway, and her heart stopped beating very nearly—the blood flew to her face.

A sense of shame overcame her—shame for herself, for him and for the other woman. What a horrible thing to follow and spy upon her husband! What scene did she meditate? What tirade should spring to her lips? It showed, indeed—the fact of her presence—how degrading was the whole matter, if it could bring her to this. And the woman who bravely had come all the way from her home to find out what she dreaded, now that enlightenment was at hand, longed to run from it, and wished herself a thousand miles away. If it were true, she would rather die than know. If it were not true, how she would loathe herself for her presence here!

The steps ceased, and in the consoling silence Mrs. Evremond regained her natural balance—and swung true. She turned from the table near which she had been standing, and more hurriedly than she had entered left the studio—almost ran past the loge of the old concierge, and unseen by her slipped out of the open gate, called a passing cab and crept into it, guiltily, closing the door upon what she felt was her dishonor.

Whereas Mrs. Evremond’s life was made up of monologue reflection, of days of solitude and lately of lonely evenings, Mr. Evremond was seldom alone. Weariness and ennui possessed him as soon as he was face to face with his thoughts in solitude, and he, therefore, arranged his life, in as much as possible, to avoid his ego, which, for some reason or other, he cared never to entertain en tÊte-À-tÊte!

He gave rendezvous for the morning hours to his men friends, so that even while he painted he was attended by one or another of a dozen intimates, who amused and diverted him. When these failed, he would even call in the curtain hanger or a carpenter for some impromptu task, and the necessity of sharing the burden of his personality he attributed to his sociability. It was innocent enough that the mere noise of a carpenter’s plane, the tap, tap, of an upholsterer’s hammer, should be company to him, yet this need of another’s presence had been the demoralization of his character. So long as there was somebody with him, he put off the moment of reckoning with himself, the salutary confession productive of the efforts which count in a man’s life. And so the inward voice of conscience had been drowned by the voice of human companions.

Evremond was pleased with the world and disgusted with himself. Good health and a love of beauty caused him perpetual enjoyment, whereas his moral insensibility, the deadening of his ego, deprived him of all happiness. He had too long stifled his yawns with a smile to be capable now of tears or laughter, and his attitude was a menace to his wife’s contentment. In the best hours of Mrs. Evremond’s married life, she had felt between her husband and herself that breach of solitude which, no matter by whom, must be filled.

She was six years younger than her husband, whom, without knowing, she loved passionately and timidly. Silent as he was, indifferent, as a rule, and always preoccupied, nevertheless he depended upon her. She was the blank page at the end of a book, the instant’s repose for the emotions—she was a habit—she was his wife.

Evremond was at the close of an affair; on his part, an affair not of business, but of the heart. For the past three months he had made desperate love to a woman not his wife. She had denied him nothing. And now it was over. Their meetings had taken place at her house and his own studio, he had seen her in her own boudoir, he had driven with her in the broad light of day through hidden alleys in the Bois. They had made sentimental journeys to the Louvre. Together they had sat in the public gardens of the Tuileries. For three long months they had amused themselves and each other. And now the affair was ended. Evremond was ready to yawn upon it already. Already the memory was becoming indistinct, blent with memories of other adventures so like to this one that it would require a useless effort to distinguish it. But this time there was something different in the ending of the romance, the happy ending reserved for sensitive readers.

This afternoon at five they had met and parted in his studio, a sundering of friendship by mutual consent, with adieux into which both had tried to put feeling enough to justify the hours they had consecrated to each other.

After she had gone he lingered in the familiar room. A long glass screen reflected the dying embers that had fallen red against the iron hearth of the stove. A certain perfume brought with a rush to his mind moments that now became intolerable to him. As he impatiently put the scenes from him, between the stove and the mirror, the mirror in which Evremond could not, try as he would, imagine himself alone, he saw a small gray spot on the polished floor. A handkerchief—no, a glove! He stooped, picked it up, and, as though in defiance of the bolder odors of heavier scent that hung in the air, a faint breath like an appeal came from the bit of suÈde which held still the imprint of a woman’s hand. His heart seemed to stop as he turned the object over in his hand. It was a small gray glove, distinctly not the property of the woman to whom he had said good-by.

He picked it up and smoothed it out; there was something in it—a bit of crumpled paper over whose ruffled surface ran the words of love and the appeal which had brought him to his last rendezvous. He could not believe his eyes! This was his wife’s glove! It meant, then, that she had found the letter which he had evidently carelessly let fall, and she had read the ridiculous sheet of paper whose words and expressions gave him now a sort of wearied nausea. She had come to the studio to confirm her doubts, she had seen them enter together, of course. She knew everything, then, everything—everything except that it was over—all that should never have been was ended. But that would not clear him in her eyes. Much disturbed and sick at heart, he went out into the streets and walked slowly along, somewhat like a man in a dream, lighting one cigarette after another, following, as it were, the leading of the tiny light that faded and glowed at the end of the paper cylinder. He walked on until the small house in which he lived near the Avenue du Bois was not more than fifteen minutes distant, then he wandered away from it, his thoughts following an irregular route.

As Mrs. Evremond got into her cab without giving an address, the coachman waited for a second, then leaned down from his box and asked her where he should drive her.

Home—she had none! Why, the term was a farce! It had meant a place shared by her husband and herself—he had dishonored it, blighted it forever in her eyes. She would go at once to her mother’s, and from there write him her conditions—they were hers to make, she knew—he would not put forth any plea; she would never see him again.

She gave the coachman an address in Passy, and the speaking of the number and street out into the dark put finality to what she did. He received it with a “Bien, madame,” as casual and cheerful as if she had given him a point of happy meeting instead of neutral ground on which to decide for misery. She sank back in the fiacre, white and shaking, and watched the lights of the interminable streets mark her as she passed, and the unconcerned passersby, whom she envied in their apparent freedom from an hour of agony.

She had been betrayed; horribly, cruelly, disloyally left for another woman. At first the jealous bitterness of it obscured all other feeling. She was only conscious of a desire to escape—to put miles between herself and her husband and to be free. He had then not loved her for long, and she had believed herself cherished. Now she believed she had only been uneasily watched. No doubt, even the few occasions on which he had showed her marked affection—notably after some unintended indifference on her part—were to be attributed to his uneasiness, to the assuaging of his conscience. That to such caresses she had been dupe was a fatal obstacle to any reconciliation.

It was her hour to choose between her rights as a wife and her divine right as a woman, and as she mused, hidden in the corner of the little, rattling carriage, Mrs. Evremond saw only the first. The reality from which she was fleeing brought its flood of indignant shame to her face, and she began to despise the ignorance which had placed her in the way of being so easily deceived. She scorned her trust in her husband, and the beautiful qualities of confidence and belief grew to appear as the most pitiable dupes—a rage of humiliation filled her as she realized her blindness during the most poignant moments of her husband’s treachery. Her constancy, her very loyal love, made her pitifully ridiculous in her own eyes.

That a man’s betrayal has power to waken such heat of passion and base humiliation as this in a gentle breast is too unfortunately the case. Evremond’s excuses for tardy entrances, his evading of little attentions to herself which would have involved the devotion of several hours, how puerile and trifling they seemed!—how bald and flagrant they appeared to her illumined understanding! Worst of all it was to feel that whatever love she had innocently shown her husband during these few months had for him no value; had only served to assure him that his wife was suspicionless—at ease; that she was successfully duped, and he might more fearlessly continue on his way. She would set him free—leave him to love whatever woman he chose without the sin of a dishonored vow. He would be at liberty—there would be no trace of her left in his life. And for herself? What would it mean for her? She must well think of it now.

With the completeness a supreme moment of grief alone is capable to accomplish, she saw in a flash her past filled with Maurice and her future without him. With an audible cry, quickly stifled, she leaned forward in the little vehicle, and stretched her hands before her as if she would seize the first, then shrank back, covering her face as if she would shut out the latter.

“I don’t believe he loves her more than me!” she cried, to her wounded soul. “I don’t believe it; there is something in me still that tells me he cares for me—and there is nothing in me to tell me that I do not love my husband—nothing to help me to take the stand of pride and jealousy. I love him—and I always shall.”

Ah, she loved him! There was no doubt about that. And how deeply inevitably it shamed her now to acknowledge it. Her history is the repetition of many a woman’s, and of women less one-minded, less unselfish, more warped by petty jealousies, whose frequency has become habit. But this, the first jealous hour of Mrs. Evremond’s life, was met by a storm of love, in which it was beaten down to the ground as, with a rush, came over her the accumulated tenderness of years, never checked, spontaneously allowed to live in her heart, if never shown to her husband. Instantly purged by its holiness—spiritualized by its unselfishness—she began to wonder if the fault did not lie with herself.

“It is never one-sided,” she thought. “He really loved me very much once—why should he stop loving me? If I have not been able to keep my husband’s love, part, at least, of the fault must be mine?”

It is rare that when a height is reached, after a painful climb, that the vision is dimmed; the reward of the struggle is sight. Whether or not she fatuously blamed herself, whether or not a stronger-minded woman, zealous for her rights and keen to the sense of hurt honor, would be able to detect any fault in the years of the gentle life, the wife, examining herself, believed she saw clear.

She had too readily accepted as a matter of course the idea that devotion promised at the altar is a commodity given over in sacred form and secure from all assaults; hers without future effort. She had slipped into married life too easily, too calmly, and now she thought stupidly, without varying, or seeking to amuse, distract or entertain—without eternally charming the man whom she had once charmed. For her restless and vacillating husband—he was this in her eyes as she mused—she had discovered nothing new in six years. She was a fixture to him—an article of furniture, one with the home, indispensable perhaps as the home itself, but only because, like inanimate things, she had been useful and had made no claim. If she now sought him in judicial manner and demanded confession, renunciation, and all the rest of it, what power remained with her still? Having brought her this far in her musings, the fiacre drove up and stopped. Looking out she saw the grille and the iron lamps hanging lit on either side the posts of the gate, and back of it the garden and her mother’s home. But the sight of this destination brought only a chill to her and no comfort. It was no welcome asylum; she had no desire to fly to her mother’s arms, to weep and pour out her grief. She felt no need of a confidant. She wanted to find some basis of her unchanged loyalty to rest upon—a natural resting place—some strength to take her to her own door.

Her grief, her contemplation of the disaster to her faith in her husband, had left her shaken in all but her love. She loved him, and any life without him was intolerable for her to face. “But,” she reflected, “however much I may prefer a future with him to no matter what life without him, it does not follow that he would decide in the same way.” Yet for some intangible reason she believed it.

She had arrived at the hour which presents itself sooner or later in the life of every married woman, the hour of combat whose issue decides the limit for all future relations.

If she should go to him to-night—wounded vanity recalcitrant—she might stipulate conditions that should forever sunder their lives. Sunder their lives she believed for a passing fantasy, for a weakness, for a caprice on his part. If, on the contrary, she went to him with forgiveness, the very fact that there was such need, that he was forced to receive it, would leave a scar. It requires more grace to forget forgiveness than to forgive. She knew her husband’s nature—it would rankle and corrode. She shrank from the ordeal of an explanation, of any rÔle that would link her with this liaison.

At all events, descent here at the friendly home was impossible. She gave her own address, Rue Leonard de Vinci, and directed a return through the Bois de Boulogne. The coachman, thinking he was driving a disappointed lady from a rendezvous manquÉ, said: “TrÈs bien, madame!” with less cheerfulness than he had shown at the first instructions. Turning briskly through Passy to La Muette, and entering the Bois at that gate, he drove her along at a jogging pace toward home. Home—it had become this once again; not as yet destroyed and marred by torturing questions and recriminations—never, please God, so to be by her! If it had any sacredness, she would try to save it still; if the link were not too fragile, she would mend it; if there were a hearthstone left she would, if she might, kindle some warmth upon it still.

“Perhaps,” she mused, “happiness is ended for my husband and me; at all events, I will not seek its destruction. Perhaps he wants to leave me and be free. He must prove it to me. He has not proved it yet. Perhaps I can learn to be to him more than any other woman can ever be—can charm him to me again as I did when I was a girl. I can try with all my heart.”

She let down the glass of the little window and leaned out. The air was sweet with the smell of the damp winter woods—the trees clustered like phantoms close to the road—there had been an ice storm, and the glistening tops of the pines shone in the night like fairy trees in crystal urns. A few stars were out, big and bright in a sky faintly blue; as Mrs. Evremond lifted her face to them they seemed to shine on her as never before. She looked up into the heavens with a childlike sweetness, and perhaps, in her hope and her goodness, with as pure a faith as prayer ever carried. She was possibly deserted definitely by the man she loved. She had been betrayed by him. She had never suffered in her life as to-day. She could never so suffer again.

We all possess the power to make those who love us suffer just so far. Evremond had come all at once to the high-tide mark of his limit. He could never cause her such keen pain again, and he paid the penalty. She loved him not less but differently, with a tenderness that comes only when we have ceased to lean—to repose; with a protection that only comes when we are conscious of weakness; with renunciation that only comes when we see and accept the destruction of the ideal, the death of illusion, and take up with courage the reality and embrace it instead.

“He shall never know that I know,” she murmured, “unless he wishes to. He has a right to his life; he has a right to love where he likes, not by law, but because of his nature. If he loves me still, if he wants to go on as we are, he will make me feel it to-night. I shall know to-night, and for all our future he shall decide.”

Mrs. Evremond was a methodical woman of reasonable habits, and not given to tardy wanderings about shops or prolonged absences from her home. She was on this night very late indeed. The long time Evremond waited for her confirmed his most unpleasant fears. He had come in about six and gone to the salon to wait her probably speedy entrance. Then, with the nervous impatience of a person who had every reason to dread, and every reason to hope for, the arrival of the expected, he watched the clock mercilessly mark hour after hour. At eight—never had she been out so late before—he said, definitely:

“She has left me—there is no doubt about it. She knows everything, and she never wants to see me again.”

Such a fact as the termination of their married relations, in the most extreme moments of his interest in another, he had never thought of—he had never wished for. He had always considered his wife suited to him, understanding his idiosyncrasies, patient and a pleasant background, but never had he supposed that the naked truth of the loss of her—or the risk of the loss of her—would fill him with dismay.

Not caring to suggest significance in her absence by questioning the servants, he waited in the salon without giving orders to retard the dinner. Every passing cab that showed evidence of drawing up to the curbstone made him go to the window, only to see the vehicle roll unconcernedly past. His wife had left the house at five o’clock in her carriage, which had been sent back from the Champs ElysÉes; this was all he knew save that she had been to his studio half an hour before his rendezvous, and had there dropped her glove with the compromising letter. The end, then, of his conventional commonplace married life was to be a kind of tragedy; the public were to have their taste offended by his delinquencies—or to remain indifferent to the subject.

At all events, the poignancy of the affair was reserved for himself alone. Consistent with his self-absorbed nature, he pictured but one sufferer. He allotted to his wife righteous anger, disgust and a jealous pride—which, nevertheless, he justified—and nothing else. With surprise and vexation he discovered that he was suffering, and, unused to pain of any kind, annoyed and ill at ease with his conscience and his fate, he could have snapped at his irritation like an animal at a tantalizing wound.

If she were, indeed, gone, then his home was wrecked in consequence of his passing passion for a woman he had always thought in no wise equal to the wife whom he had dishonored, whom he, nevertheless, discovered he treasured and valued and could not lightly lose. What folly—what poor logic—what false judgment! Neither logic nor judgment entered into the case, and he knew it, nor did an overwhelming temptation of a grand passion justify even remotely his behavior in his eyes; he admitted his weakness, his facile drifting, when he took no means to stem the tide, his half-cynical pastime. It looked to have cost him dear.

As sentiments whose characters have changed in the unalterable and fickle moment of time, when love is love no more and desire non-existent, become as unpleasant and safe as they were secret and dangerous, so he thought of his late friendship with anger and held it cheap, a priceless imitation for which perhaps he had given a pure jewel in stupid exchange.

If she did not come in by nine o’clock he would go to her, to her mother’s, where she had undoubtedly taken refuge in the sudden storm that had driven her from her own doors. Once there, facing her, what should he say? She was so simple, so direct, so honest, so unworldly. He was too intelligent not to comprehend all that occasion would require of his duplicity, subtleties, to dupe her, to make her believe—what? He could not make her now believe anything but the truth. Her entire confidence had spared him hitherto the necessity of lying to her. He owed her that.

As he said this to himself, the debt of everything that he owed came very practically to his mind. All the peace he had known; agreeable and courteous companionship whenever he had sought it; the grace and comfort of a well-ordered household; and, if anything further, he had for a long time been too careless to foster it, unheedful of its value. If she were only a habit, she was a fixed one, more steadfast than any other hitherto formed. What should he say to her? Since he could not trick her to regard the situation with anything but disgust and anger, he would tell her the truth and plead weakness without love and beg her forgiveness. His nature twinged at this, a burning flush made him hot all over. A distaste of the cowardice in such confessions nauseated him. If she forgave him, if he made a clean breast of it in loyalty to her and disloyalty to the other, things would never be the same again. Between them there would always be his weakness and her nobility. Before humiliations such as these some natures do not shrink. Evremond shivered at it with all his sensibility and pride.

“Not,” he acknowledged, “that I am too beastly proud to own up, but that I dread the result to us both. Que faire?”

At nine o’clock, his nerves on the rack, his control gone, he telephoned to the little hotel, 75 Rue Docteur Blanche.

“Mrs. Evremond has not been at her mother’s for several days—who wished to know? Was there anything wrong?”

“Nothing.”

He put up the receiver—a new thought seized him horribly. Why had he supposed this the one and only solution—the quiet solution to his wife’s problem, the sequence to her discovery? What if she had suddenly, surprisingly, taken it to heart, and it had unnerved her? He had not thought of her or her feelings. She loved him—she had loved him, he knew it well—dearly.

“What if she had——” he exclaimed, aloud, white with emotion. Then: “Nonsense,” he exclaimed, “she is not hysterical—she is control itself.”

What was she? Really, what did he know of her accurately; when had he seen her obliged to face any crisis in her quiet life?

He rang violently, and when the man came in, asked:

“When did madame go out, did you tell me? Tell me again.”

“At five. Charles drove madame a little way on the Champs ElysÉes, and was then dismissed.”

She had been gone then five hours. There was no house of an intimate friend to which she could have gone for advice or even familiar confidence. She had no intimes, no enthusiasms; she lived, and he knew it, for him and her home absolutely. She had built a simple, healthful existence around him.

In this, his first solitude, his first long soliloquy, the state of Evremond’s mind altered as did his countenance. He grew stilled, almost appalled, at what might come to his knowledge now, at any moment, and facts magnified by his vivid imagination became ghosts to him—every one.

He went from the salon to her rooms—the pretty rooms of the woman of wealth and good taste, where every article of toilet and furniture spoke charmingly of the mistress. Mrs. Evremond’s dinner dress lay out on the bed; her maid stood in the window looking out. With a word about madame’s being very late to-night, she left the room discreetly.

Neither dressing table nor bureau nor secretary had any letter for him. There was no evidence of a hasty departure, no melodramatic chaos in the tranquil rooms that, with bright wood fires and shut-in invitingness, waited her return. She had gone out, as usual, but not as usual had she returned.

These rooms, to whose voices he had been for months deaf and indifferent, spoke to him now so insistingly that he turned away from them, not able to bear their appeal.

Back in the salon the clock marked the quarter after nine—at half-past he would go out to the prefecture of the police—and what then? Did this mean that he discarded the idea of a voluntary flight from him? No—she was, of course, safe. She had simply left him without a word or sign. He could do nothing—but suffer and wait.

In her withdrawal, in his certainty of loss of her, she grew infinitely precious in his eyes and, above all the rest of the world, for the first in a long time she took her rightful place. If anything sinister had occurred he knew the whole face of life would be altered for him forever. If she had left him, he determined to move heaven and earth to win her back to him—and just here he turned sharply at the opening of the salon door.

He sprang toward her—his white and drawn face wore a look of fear and suffering that at the sight of her altered to a welcome and relief, and with a tenderness such as had never greeted Emily Evremond in her life before, he cried her name:

“Emily!” He stammered it and stopped. The face of his wife was so different to what he would have looked for it to be, her coming was so little what he had planned for, that he had no words at command.

“I am late. I am awfully late—I did not realize it was half-past nine. Have you dined, Maurice?”

She laid her muff and furs down. She had only one glove on—a gray suÈde glove; she drew it slowly off, her other hand was bare.

“Dined!” echoed her husband. “Why, I’ve been waiting for you here since six o’clock. I’ve been horribly anxious. Emily, where on earth have you been?” He might have said, “Where in heaven?” for her face was heavenly. He knew her for a pretty woman, a graceful woman, but the face of his wife, as she stood looking at him, quiet, unemotional, was of a divinity that made him marvel. He felt more infinitely far away from her than if she had not returned to him.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I had some things to do, and I did not realize the time. You must be starved, Maurice.”

What things—what had she done and planned further to do? That tears and reproaches and accusations were not in the rÔle she had given herself, he saw. Any opening of the subject by him he felt would be a grave mistake. If she said nothing he would ignore that she knew. She did not, of course, know yet that he had found her glove, even if she had purposely left it—how could she be sure that he would return? Perhaps she did not know that she had lost it, or where. His heart leaped at the respite—the little respite it was—his color came back, and the possibility of a natural attitude.

She had gone over to the mirror and was taking off her hat tranquilly, instead of going to her own room. She arranged her hair deftly and lightly with a touch here and there. Maurice watched her, and the light on her hands and on the jewels of her engagement ring and the plain round of her wedding ring. Her hands were small; on one hand all day she had worn a gray glove, and between it and her palm had lain the letter with its cruel flaunting to her of his treachery and his sin. And she returned to him like this—gentle, controlled!

He drew a deep breath. “What pluck!” he thought. “What a woman!” He adored her, and all that her unspoken forgiveness meant, all that her grace conceded, worked in him a change—a conversion. Maurice Evremond was a different man to the one who had left her that very morning—she had won her husband.

And she, for her part, was under the spell of his greeting. She wanted never to forget his face until its pallor and its transfiguration, until its significance, were fixed upon her heart. He had believed her gone—and he cared. He answered her question unconsciously without speaking a word. If he loved her ever so little, she would win the rest. She would supersede any other woman in the world with him. She turned with a smile to find his eyes fixed on her.

“Let’s go in to dinner as we are, Maurice, it’s so late.”

Evremond came to her, put his arms around her; for the thousandth part of a second he felt her shrink. He drew her close. Under his touch her face suffused like a bride’s. He saw now, as he held her, the marks of tears on her eyes; the illuminating of her spirit had concealed them until now, but the human touch brought her to life.

The sharp drawing of the cord, as the curtains were pulled back between salon and dining room, made them start apart as the maitre d’hÔtel summoned them to a repast already two hours late.

“Madame est servie.”