house, she made a slight
effort to resist it, for she was sensible enough to understand that it
was becoming a habit which she could not easily break.

Even after she was quite strong again, Griggs often left her to herself
for an hour, and he did not again come in accidentally and find her in
tears. He thought it natural that she should sometimes wish to be alone.

One day, when she had dried her eyes, she took a sheet of paper from his
table and began to write. She had no distinct intention, but she knew
that she was going to write about herself and her sufferings. It gave
her a strange and unhealthy pleasure to set down in black and white all
that she suffered. She could look at it, turn it, change it, and look at
it again. Constantly, as the pen ran on, the tears came to her eyes
afresh, and she brushed them away with a smile.

Then, all at once, she looked at the clock--the same cheap little
American clock which had ticked so long on the mantelpiece in Griggs's
old lodging upstairs. She knew that he would be back before long, and
she tore the sheets she had covered into tiny strips and threw them into
the waste-paper basket. When Griggs returned, she was singing softly to
herself over her needlework.

But she had enjoyed a rare delight in writing down the story of her
troubles. The utter loneliness of her existence, when Griggs was not
with her, made it natural enough. Then a strange thought crossed her
mind. She would write to Reanda and tell him that she had forgiven him,
and had expiated the wrong she had done him. She craved the excitement
of confession, and it could do no harm. He might, perhaps, answer her.
Griggs would never know, for she always received the letters and sorted
them for him, merely to save him trouble. The correspondence of a
newspaper man is necessarily large, covering many sources of his
information.

It was rather a wild idea, she thought, but it attracted her, or rather
it distracted her thoughts by taking her out of the daily comedy she was
obliged to keep up. There was in it, too, a very slight suggestion of
danger; for it was conceivable, though almost impossible, that some
letter of hers or her husband's might fall into Griggs's hands. There
was a perverseness about it which was seductive to her tortuous mind.

At the first opportunity she wrote a very long letter. It was the letter
of a penitent. She told him all that she had told herself a hundred
times, and it was a very diff