ofane literature.

When, at last, as the dusk fell in the room, she heard his hasty step in
the corridor, a wave of joyful expectancy rose in her heart and trembled
for utterance on her lips. Then the door opened; he came from the gloom
into the pale gleam of light that shone in from the window, and with her
first look into his face her rising joy ebbed quickly away. A new
element, something for which neither her training nor her experience had
prepared her, entered at that instant into her life. Not the external
world, but the sacred inner circle in which they had loved and known
each other was suddenly clouded. Everything outside of this was the
same, but the fact confronted her there as grimly as a physical sore.
The evil struck at the very heart of her love, since it was not life,
but Oliver that had changed.

CHAPTER VI

THE SHADOW

Oliver had changed; for months this thought had lain like a stone on her
heart. She went about her life just as usual, yet never for an instant
during that long winter and spring did she lose consciousness of its
dreadful presence. It was the first thing to face her in the morning,
the last thing from which she turned when, worn out with perplexity, she
fell asleep at night. During the day the children took her thoughts away
from it for hours, but never once, not even while she heard Harry's
lessons or tied the pink or the blue bows in Lucy's and Jenny's curls,
did she ever really forget it. Since the failure of Oliver's play, which
had seemed to her such a little thing in itself, something had gone out
of their marriage, and this something was the perfect understanding
which had existed between them. There were times when her sympathy
appeared to her almost to infuriate him. Even her efforts towards
economy--for since their return from New York she had put Marthy into
the kitchen and had taken entire charge of the children--irritated
rather than pleased him. And the more she irritated him, the more she
sought zealously, by innumerable small attentions, to please and to
pacify him. Instead of leaving him in the solitude which he sought, and
which might have restored him to his normal balance of mind, she became
possessed, whenever he shut himself in his study or went alone for a
walk, with a frenzied dread lest he should permit himself to "brood"
over the financial difficulties in which the wreck of his ambition had
placed them. She, who feared loneliness as if it were the s