's fitful flamings? Mrs. Hilmer,
raising the question, answered it tentatively by a statement that held
a curious mixture of hope and fear.

"Hilmer's going south himself next week... On business, he _says_."
She laughed harshly. "I wonder if they both think me quite a fool! ...
If he succeeds this time she's done for!"

Fred Starratt stirred in his seat.

"Don't deceive yourself," he found himself saying, coldly; "whatever
else my wife is, she's no fool... Remember, she wrote me a letter
every week. She looks over her cards before she plays them...A few
months more or less don't--"

He broke off, suddenly amazed at his cruelty. Mrs. Hilmer's expression
changed from arrested exultation to fretful appeal.

"I have only six months to live," she wailed. "If I could walk just
for a day...an hour...five minutes!"

She covered her face in her hands.

"What do you expect _me_ to do?" he asked, helplessly, with a certain
air of resignation.

She took her fingers from her eyes. A crafty smile illumined her
features. "How should I know? ...What do men do in such cases?...She
will be gone two weeks. I pray God she may never enter this house
again. But that is in your hands."

He felt suddenly cold all over, as if she had delivered an enemy into
his keeping. She still loved Axel Hilmer...loved him to the point of
hatred. What she wished for was his head upon a charger. With other
backgrounds and other circumstances crowding her to fury she would
have danced for her boon like the daughter of Herodias. As it was, she
sat like some pagan goddess, full of sinister silences, impotent, yet
unconquered.

And again Storch's prophetic words swept him:

"Like a field broken to the plow!"

There was a terrible beauty in the phrase. Was sorrow the only
plowshare that turned the quiescent soul to bountiful harvest? Was it
better to reap a whirlwind than to see a shallow yield of unbroken
content wither to its sterile end?

* * * * *

He found Ginger's lodgings that night, in a questionable quarter of
the town, but she did not respond to his knock upon the door.

"Why don't you try the streets, then?" Mrs. Hilmer's sneer recurred
with all its covert bitterness.

The suggestion made him sick. And he had fancied all along that
ugliness had lost the power to move him ... that he was prepared for
the harsh facts of existence!

He waited an hour upon the street corner, and when she came along
fin