ecretly writing to her husband grew
stronger, day by day. She did not send him all she wrote, nor a tenth
part of all, and the greater portion of her outpourings went into the
fire, or they were torn to infinitesimal bits and thrown into the
waste-paper basket. She was critical, in a strangely morbid way, of what
she wrote. The fact that she was acting for Griggs, and knew it, made
her dread to write anything to Reanda which could possibly seem
insincere. No aspiring young author ever took greater pains over his
work than she sometimes bestowed upon the composition of these letters,
or judged his work more conscientiously and severely than she. And the
result was that she told of her life with wonderful sincerity and truth.
Truth was her only luxury in the midst of the great lie she had to
sustain. She revelled in it, and yet, fearing to lose it, she used it
with a conscientiousness which she had never exhibited in anything she
had done before. It was her single delight, and she treasured it with
scrupulous and miserly care. In her letters, at least, she could be
really herself.

But the strain was telling upon her visibly, and Griggs was very anxious
about her, and hastened their departure for Subiaco as soon as the
weather began to grow warm, hoping that the mountain air would bring the
colour back to her pale cheeks. For her beauty's sake, he could almost
have deprecated the prospect, strange to say, for she had never seemed
more perfectly beautiful than now. She was thinner than she had formerly
been, and her pallor had refined her by softening the look of hard and
brilliant vitality which had characterized her before she had left
Reanda. There is perhaps no beauty which is not beautified by a touch
of sadness. Griggs saw it, and while his eyes rejoiced, his heart sank.

He knew what an utterly lonely life she was leading, even as he judged
her existence, and the tender string was touched in his deep nature. She
had sacrificed everything for him, as he told himself many a time in his
solitary walks. All the love he had given and had to give could never
repay her for what she had given him. Marriage, he reflected, was often
a bargain, but such devotion as hers was a gift for which there could be
no return. She had ruined herself in the eyes of the world for him, but
the world would never accuse him, nor shut its doors upon him because he
had accepted what she had so freely given. He was not an emotional man,
but eve