ost-card which had filled its place I regarded with languid interest.
You can imagine, then, that it was with surprise that I found, one
evening in May, a fat letter directed to me in the tall, angular hand.
The reading of it was like a blow which restored me to my senses. I
had awakened to find myself not only engaged but on the verge of
marriage. The Todds were coming home!

If my fiancee had neglected me for many months, she now overwhelmed me
with sixty closely written pages of devotion. It was as though on
coming face to face with steamer tickets she, too, had awakened from a
dream and found herself engaged. It might well be true that the few
weeks in London before embarking on the homeward stage had been her
first opportunity to sit down with pen and paper to have what she
called "a talk" with me. A year before that talk would have been
highly gratifying and flattering, but now I read with a critical eye,
and while I could find no fault with the sentiments expressed, the form
of the expression irritated me. It was natural that the sentiment pent
up in those months of hurried sight-seeing should break forth in this
moment of leisure, but to me, grown practical, the form would have been
more effective if direct and simple. In those days Penelope was so
distant from me, so cold and implacable, that I might have turned to
Gladys Todd with a thought that here at last was peace, an end of
absurd and inordinate ambition, and perhaps content. Had she written
to me simply that she was coming home, I might have soothed myself with
the idea that I, too, was going home, back to the simple ways to which
I was born, back, after all, to my own people. But Gladys Todd, grown
more cultured than ever in the grand tour and revealing her mind in
poetical phrases, was as much a being of another world than mine as was
Penelope set in her frame of costly simplicity. I should go to the
pier to meet her, I said. I knew that it could not be gladly, but I
was bound by a sense of honor, by the remembrance of four years through
which she had waited for me so patiently, always cheerful and firm in
her faith in my power to win a home for us both. Because I was so
bound, I vowed that she should never know the change in me, and then if
I set myself to the task I might fan into flame the dead embers of my
boyish infatuation.

So I stood on the pier that May morning when the Todds came home. So
grim was my determination that I might h