of fashion. Maybe it's because
the Pendleton-Grenfell element have always set their patrician faces
against it; maybe its been a bit overdone. Most people who have
tried it have discovered that the fire is no better than the frying-
pan--both hot as soon as they warm up. Of course, old boy, there's
nothing personal in this. Sit tight, and stick to the simple life--
that's your game as I see it. No news--I've never known things to
be so quiet. Jerry won over two thousand night before last--he made
it no trumps in his own hand four times running.

"Yours,

"CECIL."

Honora returned this somewhat unique epistle to her husband, and he
crushed it. There was an ill-repressed, terrifying savagery in the act,
and her heart was torn between fear and pity for this lone message
of good-will. Whatever its wording, such it was. A dark red flush had
mounted his forehead to the roots of his short curly hair.

"Well?" he said.

She was fighting for her presence of mind. Flashes of his temper she had
known, but she had never seen the cruel, fiendish thing--his anger. Not
his anger, but the anger of the destroyer that she beheld waking now
after its long sleep, and taking possession of him, and transforming him
before her very eyes. She had been able to cope with the new man, but
she felt numb and powerless before the resuscitated demon of the old.

"What do you expect me to say, Hugh?" she faltered, with a queer feeling
that she was not addressing him.

"Anything you like," he replied.

"Defend Cecil."

"Why should I defend him?" she said dully.

"Because you have no pride."

A few seconds elapsed before the full import and brutality of this
insult reached her intelligence, and she cried out his name in a voice
shrill with anguish. But he seemed to delight in the pain he had caused.

"You couldn't be expected, I suppose, to see that this letter is a d--d
impertinence, filled with an outrageous flippancy, a deliberate affront,
an implication that our marriage does not exist."

She sat stunned, knowing that the real pain would come later. That
which slowly awoke in her now, as he paced the room, was a high sense
of danger, and a persistent inability to regard the man who had insulted
her as her husband. He was rather an enemy to them both, and he would
overturn, if he could, the frail craft of their happiness in the storm.
She cried out to Hugh as across the waters