ulsive to her, and physical contact with him a dreaded thing. What
was left if he lost that self-control which had made him admirable? She
had always been able to qualify his other shortcomings by saying, "Well,
anyhow, he don't drink." She could boast of this no longer.

It was a most miserable night for her. At dinner she was forced to lie
about him (for the first time), and she did it so badly that Joe Moss
divined her trouble and came generously to her aid with a long and
amusing story about Whistler.

The play to which she took her guests did not help her to laughter, for
it set forth with diabolic skill the life of a woman who loathed her
husband, dreaded maternity, and hated herself--a baffling, marvellously
intricate and searching play--meat for well people, not for those
mentally ill at ease or morally unstable. Of a truth, Bertha saw but
half of it and comprehended less, for she could not forget the leaden
hands and flushed face of the man she called husband--and whom she had
left in his bed to sleep away his hours of intoxication. She pitied him
now--but in a new fashion. Her compassion was mixed with contempt, and
that showed more clearly than any other feeling could the depth to which
Marshall Haney had sunk.

When she came home at midnight she listened at his door, but did not
enter, for Lucius--skilled in all such matters--reported the Captain to
be "all right."

She went to her own room in a more darkly tragic mood than she had ever
known before. Her punishment, her time for trouble, had begun. "I reckon
I'm due to pay for my fun," she said to herself, "but not in the way
I've been figuring on." Haney seemed at the moment a complete physical
ruin, and the change which his helplessness wrought in her was most
radical.

His deeply penitent mood next morning hurt and repelled her almost as
much as his maudlin jocularity of the night before. She would have
preferred a brazen levity to this humble confession. "'Twas me boast,"
he sadly asserted, "that no man ever caught me with me eyes full of sand
and me tongue twisted--and now look at me! 'Tis what comes of having
nothing to do but trade lies with a lot of flat-bottomed loafers in a
gaudy bar-room. But don't worry, darlin', right here old Mart pulls up.
You'll not see anny more of this. Forget it, dear-heart--won't you now?"

She promised, of course, but the chasm between them was widened, and a
fear of his again yielding to temptation cut short her s