which he knew
nothing.

"Jerry and I like Botticelli and caviar sandwiches and street songs
and Egypt, and Roger does not," she told Clarence King once--I can
hear him roar now.

"I can talk better to you than to Roger," she confided to me one day
on the rocks; "if it were the custom to have two husbands, Jerry, I
should like you for the other--but it is not," she added mournfully.

I agreed to this with regret and she went on thoughtfully.

"You see, Roger would not like it, even if it _was_ the custom, so I
could not, anyway."

"That is very amiable of you," I said.

"It is strange how I always think of what he would like," she added,
with perfect sincerity, I am sure. "One day when he would not let me
have any more bread--it was so bad for my voice, you know--I got very
angry and spoke crossly to him, but still he would not, and I told him
that since he did not want me to sing he had better let me spoil my
voice, if I wanted to--and you would think he would, would you not,
Jerry?"

"No," I answered soberly, "no, Margarita, I wouldn't. He knew you
really wanted your voice more than the bread, so he gave you what you
wanted."

"Yes. But that day I was so angry, I planned how much more free I
should be if he were to die--was it not terrible, Jerry?--and then I
got so interested I could not stop, and I made a dying sickness for
him like my father's, and Miss Buxton came, and then I got a black
frock like Hester when my father died, and then we--you and I--made a
grave for him with my father's grave on the little point, and then
(this was all in my mind, you see, Jerry) I was so sad I cried and
cried--as I do in _Marguerite_, all over my cheeks, and then, what do
you think?"

"Heavens, child, what can I think? I don't know," I said unsteadily,
revolving God knows what of possibilities in my presumptuous and
selfish heart.

"Why," she said simply, "I felt so badly that I went to Roger (in my
mind) to tell him about it and show him the beautiful grave we had
made and my black frock (I had a little pointed bonnet with white
under the front, like the widows in Paris) and suddenly I remembered
that I could not show him--he would be dead! You see that would have
been very bad, for I had been planning all the time that he would be
there to--to--well, _that he would be there_! You see what I mean,
don't you, Jerry? Roger has to be there."

"Yes, I see," I said, very low, filled with sickening shame, "he has
to be