waste."

He stood quite idle in the little rose and white bower he had prepared
for his bride, watching Kate hurrying about his own room beyond, packing
necessities into his worn old leather satchel, somewhat hampered by the
activities of Jacqueline's puppy, who made constant playful lunges at
her feet.

He could not quite realize what had happened--that Jacqueline, his
playmate, his little friend, his wife, had gone out of the safe haven of
his home back to the man who had betrayed and deserted her. It seemed
like a hideous dream from which he must soon awake. How had he failed
her? What desperate unhappiness must have hidden itself in this pretty
white room where he had hoped she might be happy!

At intervals during the night before, he had waked to hear her softly
stirring about, and wondered why she did not come to him as usual, to be
soothed into drowsiness. Once he had almost broken his custom and gone
in to her, feeling that she had need of him. How he wished now that he
had followed this impulse! Yes, and many another like it....

Looking about, he noticed that her glass lamp was quite empty of oil,
and that her darning basket stood beside it, full to overflowing with
neatly darned and rolled socks of his own. So that was how she had spent
the night, doing her best to leave him comfortable! A great lump rose in
his throat. He saw, too, that both his own photograph and that of her
mother were gone. She had taken them with her.

His daze began to break. He remembered phrases in Jacqueline's letter:
"I didn't mean to be dishonorable ... I didn't know mother _asked_ you
to marry me ... I did him an injustice."

He went in to Kate, and demanded abruptly to know how this thing had
come about.

It was a question she had been dreading, but she answered it fully and
frankly, sparing herself not at all. He listened with an oddly judicial
air, new in her experience of him. When she described her share in
Channing's disappearance, he interrupted her quickly.

"You deceived her?"

"Yes. I know now that it was wrong."

He made no comment; but when she came to her confession to Jacqueline
that it was she who had suggested their marriage and not Philip, he
interrupted her again.

"Kate," he said slowly and incredulously, "you have been cruel!"

At any other time he would have noticed how her never-idle hands were
shaking, the paleness of her lips, the dark shadow of pain in her eyes.
But just then he was not th