ionately as he
had uttered them, and raised one of his hands to his brow. There were
drops of cold sweat upon it.

Mr. Montagu was a simple, selfish, good-natured business-man, never
given to imaginative thoughts or to greater extremes of mood than the
heights and depths of rising and falling stocks. Yet his experience of
the last two hours had shown him to himself as a creature wretchedly
inadequate to face the problem that confronted him--the simple problem
of widowerhood.

He was not bitter at his wife's death. Not only did he consider himself
too sensible for that, but he _was_ too sensible. Death is an inevitable
thing. And the one fact involving the simplicity of the problem was no
more than many another man had borne without a thought--his
childlessness.

Yet as if the whole two months in their strangeness their sad novelty,
had been concentrating their loneliness for an accumulated spring at
him, the last two hours had driven home to him that this secondary fact
had _not_ been inevitable, that what he was suffering to-night could
have been avoided.

He had not wished to have children, and neither had the beautiful woman
whose painted spirit smiled down so pitilessly now on his tragedy of
jangled nerves and intolerable solitude. Deliberately and quite frankly,
without even hiding behind the cowardly excuse of the tacit, they had
outspokenly chosen not to.

After his desperate exclamation, he had laughed and thrown himself into
his chair. He had forced the laugh, seeking to batter down with it a
thrill that was akin to fright at an abrupt realization that in those
two dreadful hours he had done three unprecedented things. He had spoken
aloud there by himself, an action he had always ascribed exclusively to
children and maniacs; he had harbored absurd temptations; and finally he
had ejaculated "My God!" which he had thought appropriate to a man only
in the distresses of fiction or after complete ruin on the Stock
Exchange.

That exclamation had sprung from him when he had caught himself thinking
how gladly he would give half his fortune if he could have a companion,
even his butler, for the rest of the evening, his whole fortune, exactly
as if he had died, if he could but have a son to give it to.

That freedom from care, which they had chosen to call freedom from
responsibility, had been their mutual property, but to-night, in his
hopeless solitude, it seemed that he was paying the whole price for it.
Sh