nd or a sister--but
not the bright enthusiasm of a bride.

Tollman himself, the observer would have said, had left nothing to ask.
Seemingly his one wish was to treat his life as a slate upon which every
unacceptable word and line should be sponged out and rewritten.

The wife sat in the study of her husband's house a day or two after
their return, when Tollman entered with a face full of apprehension. He
had just suffered a fright which had made his heart miss a beat or two
and had set his brain swirling with a fevered vision of all future
happiness wrecked on a shoal of damnable folly. When he had presented
his wife with the keys of his house he had not laid upon her any
Bluebeard injunction that one door she must never open. Bluebeard lived
in a more rudimentary age, and his needs included a secret chamber. The
things which Eben Tollman earnestly desired to conceal from his wife's
view could be adequately stored in the small safe of his study, since
they were less cumbersome than the mortal remains of prior wives done to
death. They were in fact only documents--but for him pregnant with
peril--and what had stamped his face suddenly with terror was the
realization that now for the only time in all his meticulously careful
life--he had left them open to other eyes than his own.

The old minister had been moved bag, baggage and creed over to
Tollman's larger house, and in these days of reaccommodated regime, the
road between the two places was one busy with errand-running. On one of
these missions Eben had been driving with the slow sedateness which was
his wont, when upon pleasant reflections, like shrapnel disturbing a
picnic, burst the sense of danger, and the realization of his folly. It
struck the self-congratulation from his face as abruptly as a broken
circuit quenches a lighting system.

He saw the table in his study as he had left it: the strongbox open--the
safe, too, from which he had taken it, agape: papers lying in
unprotected confusion. Among them were the two purloined letters which
had made his marriage possible, and which if discovered would end it in
the volcanic flames of his wife's wrath. There were also certain
memoranda concerning the affairs of William Williams which might have
raised an ugly implication of an estate wrecked at the hands of a
trusted friend. His fear-inflamed imagination went a step further until
it saw also his wife's figure halting in her task of tidying up the
study and her