ng the rudiments of their new medium of
communication; and he had to grope for her through the dense fog of his
humiliation, the distorting vapor against which his personality loomed
grotesque and mean.

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us
enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of
self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If
Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there
was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling
seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to
the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breast on which
he leaned.

They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious
track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a
haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it,
to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned
shade. If only they might cut away through the thicket to that restoring
spring!

Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no
natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in
the purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the
inefficacy of such amends, the woman's instinctive subjectiveness made
her find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she
meant to live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt
was discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching,
in its merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to
acquit. Her mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters,
and this he knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched,
meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which
she regarded as the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations
drew her nearer to him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness,
to restore the full protecting stature of his love. And still they did
not speak.

It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire,
she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered.

"I've heard from Mr. Flamel," she said.

Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly
become visible to both. He took the letter mechanically.

"It's from Smyrna," she said. "Won't you read it?"

He handed it back. "You can tell