The instinct
of self-preservation--sometimes the most perilous that man can
exercise--made him awkwardly declare--"Oh, I used to see her at people's
houses, that was all;" and her silence as usual leaving room for a
multiplication of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, "I
simply can't see what you can find to interest you in such a book."

She seemed to consider this intently. "You've read it, then?"

"I glanced at it--I never read such things."

"Is it true that she didn't wish the letters to be published?"

Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge,
and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step
ahead.

"I'm sure I don't know," he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed
his hand through her arm. "I didn't have tea at the Dreshams, you know;
won't you give me some now?" he suggested.

That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself
into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his
papers he said to his wife: "You're not going to sit indoors on such a
night as this? I'll join you presently outside."

But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. "I want to look at my book,"
she said, taking up the first volume of the "Letters."

Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. "I'm going to shut
the door; I want to be quiet," he explained from the threshold; and she
nodded without lifting her eyes from the book.

He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was
he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume
in her hand? The door did not shut her out--he saw her distinctly, felt
her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise.

The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel
like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown
country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in
an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our
habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the
boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife's character
not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his
ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by
the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before.
As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession
of a sensitive nerve, he had lived b