pretty and you liked it. We might enlarge it,
the drawing-room might be thrown out--perhaps another wing." I felt that
our good fortune as from this day was at last established.

But my mother had been listening with growing impatience, her puzzled
glances giving place gradually to flashes of anger; and now she turned
her face full upon him, her question written plainly thereon, demanding
answer.

Some idea of it I had even then, watching her; and since I have come to
read it word for word: "But that woman--that woman that loves you, that
you love. Ah, I know--why do you play with me? She is rich. With her
your life will be smooth. And the boy--it will be better far for him.
Cannot you three wait a little longer? What more can I do? Cannot you
see that I am surely dying--dying as quickly as I can--dying as that
poor creature your friend once told us of; knowing it was the only thing
she could do for those she loved. Be honest with me: I am no longer
jealous. All that is past: a man is ever younger than a woman, and a man
changes. I do not blame you. It is for the best. She and I have talked;
it is far better so. Only be honest with me, or at least silent. Will
you not honour me enough for even that?"

My father did not answer, having that to speak of that put my mother's
question out of her mind for all time; so that until the end no word
concerning that other woman passed again between them. Twenty years
later, nearly, I myself happened to meet her, and then long physical
suffering had chased the wantonness away for ever from the pain-worn
mouth; but in that hour of waning voices, as some trouble of the fretful
day when evening falls, so she faded from their life; and if even the
remembrance of her returned at times to either of them, I think it must
have been in those moments when, for no seeming reason, shyly their
hands sought one another.

So the truth of the sad ado--how far my mother's suspicions wronged my
father; for the eye of jealousy (and what loving woman ever lived that
was not jealous?) has its optic nerve terminating not in the brain
but in the heart, which was not constructed for the reception of true
vision--I never knew. Later, long after the curtain of green earth
had been rolled down upon the players, I spoke once on the matter with
Doctor Hal, who must have seen something of the play and with more
understanding eyes than mine, and who thereupon delivered to me a short
lecture on life in genera