asked, after a pause in which she had
struggled vainly to look as if it were the most natural thing in the
world that he should receive her in this way. "If I had known you were
coming, I should have met you."

"Father wanted to, but I wouldn't let him," she answered. "I--I thought
you were sick."

In spite of his despair, it is probable that at the moment she was
suffering more than he was--since a wound to love strikes deeper, after
all, than a wound to ambition. Where she had expected to find her
husband, she felt vaguely that she had encountered a stranger, and she
was overwhelmed by that sense of irremediable loss which follows the
discovery of terrible and unfamiliar qualities in those whom we have
known and loved intimately for years. The fact that he was plainly
struggling to disguise his annoyance, that he was trying as hard as she
to assume a manner he did not feel, only added a sardonic humour to
poignant tragedy.

"Have you had anything to eat?" he asked abruptly, and remembering that
he had not kissed her when she entered, he put his arm about her and
brushed her cheek with his lips.

"No, I waited to breakfast with you. I was in such a hurry to get here."

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and going over to the bell, he touched it with
the manner of a man who is delighted that anything so perfectly
practical as food exists in the world.

While he was speaking to the waiter, she took off her hat, and washed
the stains of smoke and tears from her face. Her hair was a sight, she
thought, but while she gazed back at her stricken eyes in the little
mirror over the washstand, she recalled with a throb of gratitude that
the stranger on the boat had said she was pretty. She felt so humble
that she clung almost with desperation to the thought that Oliver always
liked to have people admire her.

When she turned from the washstand, he was reading the newspaper again,
and he put it aside with a forced cheerfulness to arrange the table for
breakfast.

"Aren't you going to have something too?" she asked, looking
disconsolately at the tray, for all her hunger had departed. If he would
only be natural she felt that she could bear anything! If he would only
stop trying to pretend that he was not miserable and that nothing had
happened! After all, it couldn't be so very bad, could it? It wasn't in
the least as if one of the children were ill.

She poured out a cup of coffee for him before drinking her own, and
putting i