n you," he said, "for some fancied lack of
perception. It is I who owe an apology to you. Try and forgive me for
having married you.... I should have known from the first that no good or
happiness could ever come of a contract like ours."

"Have I ever said I was unhappy?" she demanded. Her breath came quick and
short.

"Your face has said so very often," returned Saxham, looking at it,
"though you were too considerate to tell me so in words. But I ask you on
this night that sees you freed from an illusion, to have courage and not
yield to depression. Your fetters may be broken sooner than you think!"

"Owen!..."

She was paler than before, if that could be possible. She swayed a little,
and caught at the back of a chair that was near, and there was terror in
her darkened, dilated eyes....

"Do you say this to prepare me? Have you any illness? Do you mean that you
are going to die?"

"I meant nothing ..." answered Saxham, "except that men are mortal,
sometimes fortunately for the women who are bound to them! Go to bed, my
child; to sleep will do you good."

"Good-night," she said, and dropped her head, and went away. He opened
the door for her, and locked it after her, and went back to the
writing-table, and sat in his chair. He gripped the arms of it in anguish,
and the sweat of agony stood on the broad forehead where a woman who had
loved him would have laid her lips.

He had repelled her, slighted her, wounded her.... He knew what it had
cost him not to take those offered hands.... He was tortured and wrung in
body and in soul as he took a key that hung upon his chain and unlocked a
deep drawer, and took a flask from it that gurgled as if some mocking
sprite had laughed aloud when he shook it close to his ear. He whom she
had praised as honourable was a traitor no less than the dead man. He had
said to her, months ago in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp:

"I may die, but I will never fail you!"

He had not died, and he had failed her. The Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp was
drinking hard again.

LIX

Before you turn away in loathing of the man whose experience of Life's
game of football had been chiefly gained from the ball's point of view,
hear how it happened that the work of all those months of stern
self-repression and strenuous denial had been rendered useless.

In the previous July, when Sir Danvers Muller was visiting Lord Williams
of Afghanistan at Pretoria, Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., had bee