t's happened lately to keep us apart seems a
dream, something utterly unreal. Come, Felicity, don't you think our
meeting was rather a cold one, after such a long separation? Have n't
I won the prize you set for me to win, and are you going to deny me my
reward?" He made as if he would put his arm about her, but she shrank
away with such emphatic and spontaneous denial that he desisted in
chagrin. "After all there has been between us," he protested, "are you
going to let a passing flirtation outweigh the fact that we are man and
wife?"

Felicity had somehow not anticipated that he would attempt to kiss her,
and the movement set her quivering as at an outrage.

"Has there really been so much between us, Tom?" she asked. "Doesn't
it all seem a great mistake, which it would be better to acknowledge
frankly, rather than to assume the existence of something that has
ceased to exist?"

"And whose mistake was it?" he demanded, with sudden fierceness. "Tell
me that."

"Mine," she admitted. "You know how I came to make it--the narrowness
of my life that yet seemed so broad, the insignificance of the
artificial men I knew, the longing for romance, for a love affair with
a flavour of risk and adventure in it. You must n't hold me now to
that girl's dream, since you were the one that waked me from it. You
showed me first that we really did n't care for each other. If you
loved me, why did you take up with the first pretty servant-girl you
met?"

She had not meant to recall their difference in class, but in Lena's
station in life lay the chief sting of his offence, and the fact could
not be concealed.

"Why? Why?" he echoed. "Because she loved me more than you did,--if
you ever loved me at all,--because you starved my heart and made me
feel that you were not my wife at all, but only a patroness who had
taken me up to make something of me, with an indefinite promise of a
reward at the end of it, if I would be a good little boy and do as you
told me, and keep out of mischief, and win a prize. What kind of a
position is that to put a man in?"

"I supposed the reward was worth working and waiting for," she retorted
coolly. "You 're whipping yourself into a passion now, Tom, but you
know in your heart that my cruelty to you, if it was cruelty, was not
as great as your cruelty to Lena. I would have kept my promise, and
you know it, if you had not yourself forfeited all claim to my respect.
I supposed you were a st