you might have let me take the jolly room downstairs
with the pink curtains. And it makes me awfully hopeful about my book."

He had expected a rapturous outburst, and perhaps some reassertion
of wifely faith in the glorious future that awaited The Pageant of
Alexander; and deep down under the lover's well-being the author felt a
faint twinge of mortified vanity when Susy, leaping to her feet, cried
out, ravenously and without preamble: "Oh, Nick, Nick--let me see how
much they've given you!"

He flourished the cheque before her in the firelight. "A couple of
hundred, you mercenary wretch!"

"Oh, oh--" she gasped, as if the good news had been almost too much for
her tense nerves; and then surprised him by dropping to the ground, and
burying her face against his knees.

"Susy, my Susy," he whispered, his hand on her shaking shoulder. "Why,
dear, what is it? You're not crying?"

"Oh, Nick, Nick--two hundred? Two hundred dollars? Then I've got to tell
you--oh now, at once!"

A faint chill ran over him, and involuntarily his hand drew back from
her bowed figure.

"Now? Oh, why now?" he protested. "What on earth does it matter
now--whatever it is?"

"But it does matter--it matters more than you can think!"

She straightened herself, still kneeling before him, and lifted her head
so that the firelight behind her turned her hair into a ruddy halo. "Oh,
Nick, the bracelet--Ellie's bracelet.... I've never returned it to her,"
she faltered out.

He felt himself recoiling under the hands with which she clutched his
knees. For an instant he did not remember what she alluded to; it was
the mere mention of Ellie Vanderlyn's name that had fallen between them
like an icy shadow. What an incorrigible fool he had been to think they
could ever shake off such memories, or cease to be the slaves of such a
past!

"The bracelet?--Oh, yes," he said, suddenly understanding, and feeling
the chill mount slowly to his lips.

"Yes, the bracelet... Oh, Nick, I meant to give it back at once; I
did--I did; but the day you went away I forgot everything else. And when
I found the thing, in the bottom of my bag, weeks afterward, I thought
everything was over between you and me, and I had begun to see Ellie
again, and she was kind to me and how could I?" To save his life he
could have found no answer, and she pressed on: "And so this morning,
when I saw you were frightened by the expense of bringing all the
children with us, and when I fe