presence of some splinters at the elbow,
which the injury had thrust up into and displaced some of the nerves and
sinew there.

When we had come back home and Nederlinck, the surgeon, had discovered
how the healing process had gone on, he told me that for many weeks my
wife would have to suffer great pain from the readjustment of the
irritated nerves. For two months he did what little he could and then
left the rest to time.

Julianna suffered silently. She complained little, but I could see a
marked change in her. She became restless. I have seen her pace up and
down a room for hours, like a captured animal longing for the jungle,
and remain at the dinner-table, after the time had come to go to our
library for coffee, with her great round eyes staring before her until
some one spoke to her. Her vigor disappeared. The moods which had
followed the reading of the _post-mortem_ message from the Judge
returned; her little exhibits of affection and, I think, even her
innocence of personality disappeared. The spectre, whatever it was,
seemed present once more. At times I believed I saw in her beautiful
face a look of guilt, of fear--the look of a soul in a panic. She became
suspicious of her friends and withdrew from them more and more, at times
with such awkward haste that it seemed as if she believed they were
about to observe some fact which she must, at any cost, hide. Little by
little, too, I believed that I detected signs that she was drawing away
from me.

For some reason I have always dated the beginning of this change to that
morning when Julianna went off to ride alone. Yet, if I wanted to be
sure of bringing back to her face an old trace of her mischievous smile,
it was only necessary for me to question her about the cause of her
accident.

"I have promised the horse never to tell," she would say, putting her
finger to her red lips. And I have never been able to decide whether she
was concealing, playfully, some little folly or awkwardness of her own,
or, behind her light manner, some more serious experience.

In any case, it was plain that some accursed thing had come between us.
I found after some months that I must face this as a fact. We said
little to each other from morning till night. When evening had come I
did not go home, as I always had, with a little thrill of the old
expectation which had never seemed to wear out. Instead I had a
subconscious reluctance to enter a relation in which each day sympa