ary to the
dining-room, and then from the dining-room into the pantry. Here, the
dishes were all washed, the cup-towels were drying in an orderly row
beside the sink, and the two maids and the butler were "drawing a
breath" in wooden chairs by the stove.

"There was enough chicken salad and ice cream left for supper, wasn't
there, Wotan?"

On being assured that there was enough for a week, she gave a few
directions about the distribution of the other food left from the
wedding breakfast, and then went out again and into Oliver's study. A
feeling of restlessness more acute than any she had ever known kept her
walking back and forth between the door and the window, which looked out
into a square of garden, where a few lonely sticks protruded out of the
discoloured snow on the grass. She had lived for others so long that
she had at last lost the power of living for herself.

There was nothing to do to-day; there would be nothing to do to-morrow;
and, unless Jenny came home to be married, there would be nothing to do
next year or the years after that. While Oliver was in Dinwiddie, she
had, of course, the pleasure of supplying his food and of watching him
eat it; but beyond that, even when he sat in the room with her, there
was little conversation between them. She herself loved to talk, for she
had inherited her mother's ability to keep up a honeyed flow of sound
about little things; but she had learned long ago that there were times
when her voice, rippling on about nothing, only irritated him, and with
her feminine genius for adaptability, she had made a habit of silence.
He never spoke to her of his work except in terms of flippant ridicule
which pained her, and the supreme topic of the children's school reports
had been absent now for many years. Companionship of a mental sort had
always been lacking between them, yet so reverently did she still accept
the traditional fictions of marriage, that she would have been
astonished at the suggestion that a love which could survive the shocks
of tragedy might at last fade away from a gradual decline of interest.
Nothing had happened. There had been no scenes, no quarrels, no
jealousies, no recriminations--merely a gentle, yet deliberate,
withdrawal of personalities. He had worshipped her at twenty-two, and
now, at forty-seven, there were moments when she realized with a stab of
pain that she bored him; but beyond this she had felt no cause for
unhappiness, and until the las