see you--upset like this. I'll do
anything I can to make you happy."

"Not things, not--not toys," Trixton Brent's expression involuntarily
coming to her lips. "Oh, can't you see I'm not that kind of a woman?
I don't want to be bought. I want you, whatever you are, if you are. I
want to be saved. Take care of me--see a little more of me--be a little
interested in what I think. God gave me a mind, and--other men have
discovered it. You don't know, you can't know, what temptations you
subject me to. It isn't right, Howard. And oh, it is humiliating not to
be able to interest one's husband."

"But you do interest me," he protested.

She shook her head.

"Not so much as your business," she said; "not nearly so much."

"Perhaps I have been too absorbed," he confessed. "One thing has
followed another. I didn't suspect that you felt this way. Come, I'll
try to brace up." He pressed her to him. "Don't feel badly. You're
overwrought. You've exaggerated the situation, Honora. We'll go in on
the eight o'clock train together and look at the house--although I'm
afraid it's a little steep," he added cautiously.

"I don't care anything about the house," said Honora. "I don't want it."

"There!" he said soothingly, "you'll feel differently in the morning.
We'll go and look at it, anyway."

Her quick ear, however, detected an undertone which, if not precisely
resentment, was akin to the vexation that an elderly gentleman might be
justified in feeling who has taken the same walk for twenty years,
and is one day struck by a falling brick. Howard had not thought of
consulting her in regard to remaining all winter in Quicksands. And,
although he might not realize it himself, if he should consent to go to
New York one reason for his acquiescence would be that the country in
winter offered a more or less favourable atmosphere for the recurrence
of similar unpleasant and unaccountable domestic convulsions. Business
demands peace at any price. And the ultimatum at Rivington, though
delivered in so different a manner, recurred to him.

The morning sunlight, as is well known, is a dispeller of moods, a
disintegrator of the night's fantasies. It awoke Honora at what for her
was a comparatively early hour, and as she dressed rapidly she heard her
husband whistling in his room. It is idle to speculate on the phenomenon
taking place within her, and it may merely be remarked in passing that
she possessed a quality which, in a man, leads to a