"Why, wasn't it an angel," Patricia queried, all impishness now, "who
kept the first man and woman out of paradise?"

"If--if I thought you meant that----!" he cried; and then he shrugged
his shoulders. "My wife's virtues merit a better husband than Fate has
accorded her. Anne is the best woman I have ever known."

Patricia was not unnaturally irritated. After all, one does not take the
trouble to meet a man accidentally in a plantation of young beech-trees
in order to hear him discourse of his wife's good qualities; and
besides, Mr. Charteris was speaking in a disagreeably solemn manner,
rather as if he fancied himself in a cathedral.

Therefore Patricia cast down her eyes again, and said:

"Men of genius are so rarely understood by their wives."

"We will waive the question of genius." Mr. Charteris laughed heartily,
but he had flushed with pleasure.

"I suppose," he continued, pacing up and down with cat-like fervor,
"that matrimony is always more or less of a compromise--like two
convicts chained together trying to catch each other's gait. After a
while, they succeed to a certain extent; the chain is still heavy, of
course, but it does not gall them as poignantly as it used to do. And I
fear the artistic temperament is not suited to marriage; its capacity
for suffering is too great."

Mr. Charteris caught his breath in shuddering fashion, and he paused
before Patricia. After a moment he grasped her by both wrists.

"We are chained fast enough, my lady," he cried, bitterly, "and our
sentence is for life! There are green fields yonder, but our allotted
place is here in the prison-yard. There is laughter yonder in the
fields, and the scent of wild flowers floats in to us at times when we
are weary, and the whispering trees sway their branches over the
prison-wall, and their fruit is good to look on, and they hang within
reach--ah, we might reach them very easily! But this is forbidden fruit,
my lady; and it is not included in our wholesome prison-fare. And so
don't think of it! We have been happy, you and I, for a little. We
might--don't think of it! Don't dare think of it! Go back and help your
husband drag his chain; it galls him as sorely as it does you. It galls
us all. It is the heaviest chain was ever forged; but we do not dare
shake it off!"

"I--oh, Jack, Jack, don't you dare to talk to me like that! We must be
brave. We must be sensible." Patricia, regardless of her skirts, sat
down upon the groun