ong
kiss.

Suddenly she sat upright and turned a desperate face on him. "Why on
earth are you staring at me like that? Anybody can see what's the
matter!"

He winced at her tone, but managed to get one of her hands in his; and
they stayed thus in silence, eye to eye.

"Are you as sorry as all that?" he began at length conscious of the
flatness of his voice.

"Sorry--sorry? I'm--I'm--" She snatched her hand away, and went on
weeping.

"But, Undine--dearest--bye and bye you'll feel differently--I know you
will!"

"Differently? Differently? When? In a year? It TAKES a year--a whole
year out of life! What do I care how I shall feel in a year?"

The chill of her tone struck in. This was more than a revolt of the
nerves: it was a settled, a reasoned resentment. Ralph found himself
groping for extenuations, evasions--anything to put a little warmth into
her! "Who knows? Perhaps, after all, it's a mistake."

There was no answering light in her face. She turned her head from him
wearily.

"Don't you think, dear, you may be mistaken?"

"Mistaken? How on earth can I be mistaken?"

Even in that moment of confusion he was struck by the cold competence of
her tone, and wondered how she could be so sure.

"You mean you've asked--you've consulted--?" The irony of it took him
by the throat. They were the very words he might have spoken in some
miserable secret colloquy--the words he was speaking to his wife!

She repeated dully: "I know I'm not mistaken."

There was another long silence. Undine lay still, her eyes shut,
drumming on the arm of the sofa with a restless hand. The other lay
cold in Ralph's clasp, and through it there gradually stole to him the
benumbing influence of the thoughts she was thinking: the sense of
the approach of illness, anxiety, and expense, and of the general
unnecessary disorganization of their lives.

"That's all you feel, then?" he asked at length a little bitterly, as if
to disguise from himself the hateful fact that he felt it too. He stood
up and moved away. "That's all?" he repeated.

"Why, what else do you expect me to feel? I feel horribly ill, if that's
what you want." He saw the sobs trembling up through her again.

"Poor dear--poor girl...I'm so sorry--so dreadfully sorry!"

The senseless reiteration seemed to exasperate her. He knew it by the
quiver that ran through her like the premonitory ripple on smooth water
before the coming of the wind. She turned about on him and j