ular on the desk beside her account book.
She had an ample allowance from Hugh; but lying in a New York bank was
what remained of the unexpected legacy she had received from her father,
and it was from this that she presently drew a cheque for five hundred
dollars,--a little sacrifice that warmed her blood as she wrote. Not for
the unfortunate in the hospital was she making it, but for him: and that
she could do this from the little store that was her very own gave her
a thrill of pride. She would never need it again. If he deserted her, it
mattered little what became of her. If he deserted her!

She sat gazing out of the window over the snow, and a new question
was in her heart. Was it as a husband--that he loved her? Did their
intercourse have that intangible quality of safety that belonged to
married life? And was it not as a mistress rather than a wife that, in
their isolation, she watched his moods so jealously? A mistress! Her
lips parted, and she repeated the word aloud, for self-torture is human.

Her mind dwelt upon their intercourse. There were the days they spent
together, and the evenings, working or reading. Ah, but had the time
ever been when, in the depths of her being, she had felt the real
security of a wife? When she had not always been dimly conscious of
a desire to please him, of a struggle to keep him interested and
contented? And there were the days when he rode alone, the nights when
he read or wrote alone, when her joy was turned to misery; there were
the alternating periods of passion and alienation. Alienation, perhaps,
was too strong a word. Nevertheless, at such times, her feeling was one
of desolation.

His heart, she knew, was bent upon success at Grenoble, and one of the
books which they had recently read together was a masterly treatise, by
an Englishman, on the life-work of an American statesman. The vast
width of the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was stirred with
politics: a better era was coming, the pulse of the nation beating with
renewed life; a stronger generation was arising to take the Republic
into its own hands. A campaign was in progress in the State, and twice
her husband had gone some distance to hear the man who embodied the new
ideas, and had come back moody and restless, like a warrior condemned
to step aside. Suppose his hopes were blighted--what would happen? Would
the spirit of reckless adventure seize him again? Would the wilds call
him? or the city? Sh