truck deep into his very being and altered him
in everything except in his love and tender care for her. "Oh, why is
it? what is the matter?" she asked her self a thousand times a day.
Could it be possible that he had discovered the secret which tortured
her, the only secret she had ever had from him, the secret she had
longed to confess to him a hundred times but had lacked courage to do
it.

For she had sinned deeply against her husband, she knew. Her fear and
her confusion had driven her deeper and deeper into the waters of
deceit until it was impossible for her to find the words that would have
brought help and comfort from the man whom she loved more than anything
else in the world. In the very earliest stages of Winkler's persecution
she had lost her head completely and instead of confessing to her
husband and asking for his aid and protection, she had pawned the rich
jewels which had been his wedding present to get the money demanded
by the blackmailer. In her ignorance she had thought that this one sum
would satisfy him.

But he came again and again, demanding money which she saved from
her pin money, from her household allowance, thus taking what she had
intended to use to redeem her jewels. The pledge was lost, and her
jewels gone forever. From now on, Mrs. Thorne lived in a terror which
sapped her strength and drank her life blood drop by drop. Any hour
might bring discovery, a discovery which she feared would shake her
husband's love for her. The poor weak little woman grew pale and ill.
She wrote finally to her step-brother, but he could think of no way
out; he wrote only that if the matter came to a scandal there would be
nothing for him to do but to kill himself. This was one reason more for
her silence, and Mrs. Thome faded to a wan shadow of her former sunny
self.

As she looked down from the balcony, she was like a woman suffering
from a deathly illness. A new terror had come to her heart because her
husband had gone away so early without telling her why or whither he had
gone. When she saw him coming towards the door of the hotel, pale and
drooping, and when she saw Mrs. Bernauer beside him, her heart seemed to
stand still. She crept back from the window and stood in the middle of
the room as Herbert Thorne and his former nurse entered.

"What has happened?" This was all she could say as she looked into the
distraught face of the housekeeper, into her husband's sad eyes.

He led her to a chair,