unschooled,
when you first asked me, and I did not know my own mind; but I know it
now, and so I go to Rudyard Byng for better or for worse--"

He suddenly stopped reading, sat back in his chair, and laughed
sardonically.

"For richer, for poorer'--now to have launched out on the first phrase,
and to have jibbed at the second was distinctly stupid. The quotation
could only have been carried off with audacity of the ripest kind. 'For
better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health,
till death us do part, amen--' That was the way to have done it, if it
was to be done at all. Her cleverness forsook her when she wrote that
letter. 'Our year of probation'--she called it that. Dear, dear, what a
poor prevaricator the best prevaricator is! She was sworn to me, bound
to me, wanted a year in which to have her fling before she settled
down, and she threw me over--like that."

He did not read the rest of the letter, but got up, went over to the
fire, threw it in, and watched it burn.

"I ought to have done so when I received it," he said, almost kindly
now. "A thing like that ought never to be kept a minute. It's a
terrible confession, damning evidence, a self-made exposure, and to
keep it is too brutal, too hard on the woman. If anything had happened
to me and it had been read, 'Not all the King's horses nor all the
King's men could put Humpty Dumpty together again.'"

Then he recalled the brief letter he had written her in reply. Unlike
him, she had not kept his answer, when it came into her hands, but,
tearing it up into fifty fragments, had thrown it into the
waste-basket, and paced her room in shame, anger and humiliation.
Finally, she had taken the waste-basket and emptied it into the flames.
She had watched the tiny fragments burn in a fire not hotter than that
in her own eyes, which presently were washed by a flood of bitter tears
and passionate and unavailing protest. For hours she had sobbed, and
when she went out into the world the next day, it was with his every
word ringing in her ears, as they had rung ever since: the sceptic
comment at every feast, the ironical laughter behind every door, the
whispered detraction in every loud accent of praise.

"Dear Jasmine," his letter had run, "it is kind of you to tell me of
your intended marriage before it occurs, for in these distant lands
news either travels slowly or does not reach one at all. I am fortunate
in having my information from the very