lked the
streets, a deceived and baffled bridegroom, until in desperation he
took the midnight train and arrived home at dawn, too weary to care for
aught but sleep.

When they met again in Warwick, she resumed her mysterious power of
direction as before, and his status as her husband gave him no
advantage that he dared to press. He accepted the secret interviews
she granted, and learned at last the part he had to play. On that
promissory note which she had given him at the altar she paid the
instalment of a few elusive kisses, and he discovered to his dismay
that he must do some great thing to make himself worthy of her, before
the note should be paid in full. It was she who had seen the
possibilities of his connection with a union and of his interest in
politics, and had suggested the career he was to follow. His election
as mayor was to be crowned by her acknowledgement of him before the
world. This was the plan in which he had acquiesced, as one who had
only to obey and to wait humbly for his reward.

But a sense of power developed with the struggle. It was true that she
had directed his feet into the right path; but once there, he began to
feel that he would have found it unaided. She was secret with him,
giving and withholding as she chose. He saw her with other men, and
his strong nature rebelled. Should she be free, while he was bound?
At a certain meeting he presented this point of view, but she said
truly enough that the men she met were nothing to her, and that to do
as he wished would only excite surprise and suspicion. She would fain
play the part of Egeria and lay down the law to him in stolen
interviews beyond the city. But Emmet had never heard of that
delightful arrangement, and the role of a Numa in the making began to
be intolerable to him. When they met again, he no longer upbraided
her, for he had met Lena Harpster at a lodge dance in the interval, and
in the culmination of a reckless mood, he had taken his revenge. Only
a consciousness of his own duplicity saved Felicity from his insistence
and restored her power.

Emmet meant that the affair with Lena should go no further, but the
memory of the kiss she had given him drew him back at last and he
sought her out, as the first man might have sought again the first
woman in the Garden of Eden, after an ingenuous shame had driven them
asunder. And hereupon began a titanic struggle in his soul. He knew
that he loved his wife and meant