she had often thought she might during
the long summer months. In those days her eyes had filled with tears of
pity for herself. They were dry now, for the suffering was real and the
pain was in her bodily heart. Yet she was so strong, and she feared Paul
Griggs with such an abject fear, that she played the comedy when she
could not make him think that she was asleep.

"My only thought is for you," she said. "It is another burden on you."

He was utterly happy, and he laughed aloud.

"It is another reason for working," he said.

And even as he said it she saw the writing-table, the poor room, his
stern, determined face and busy hand, and herself seated in her own
chair, with a half-read novel on her lap, staring at the grey future of
mediocrity and mean struggling that loomed like a leaden figure above
his bent head. Year after year, perhaps, she was to sit in that chair
and watch the same silent battle for bare existence. It was too horrible
to be borne. If only he were a man of genius, she could have suffered it
all, she thought, and more also. But he himself said that he had no
genius. His terrible mechanics of mind killed the little originality he
had. His gloomy sobriety over his work made her desperate. But she
feared him. The belief grew on her that if he ever found out that she
did not love him, he would end life then, for them both--perhaps for
them all three.

Surely, hell had no tortures worse than hers, she thought. Yet she bore
them, in terror of him. And he was perfectly happy and suspected
nothing. She could not understand how with his melancholy nature and his
constant assertion that he had but a little talent and much industry for
all his stock in trade, he could believe in his own future as he did. It
was an anomaly, a contradiction of terms, a weak point in the low level
of his unimaginative, dogged strength. She thought often of the poor
book he had written. She had heard that talent was stirred to music by a
great passion that strung it and struck it, till its heartstrings rang
wild changes and breathed deep chords, and burst into rushing harmonies
of eloquence. But his love was dumb and dull, though it might be deadly.
There had been neither eloquence nor music in his book. It had been an
old story, badly told. He had said that he was only fit to be a
newspaper man, and it was true, so far as she could see. His letters to
the paper were excellent in their way, but that was all he could do. And