she had gone only a step or two when she heard him
coming after her quickly.

"Where are you?"

"Here," quavered Jane, not quite sure of him or of herself perhaps.

But when he stopped beside her he didn't try to touch her arm again.
He only said:

"I wouldn't have you forty for anything in the world. I want you to
be just as you are, very beautiful and young."

Then, as if he was afraid he would say too much, he turned on his
heel, and a moment after he kicked against the fallen pitcher in the
darkness and awoke a thousand echoes. As for Jane, she put her
fingers to her ears and ran to her room, where she slammed the door
and crawled into bed with burning cheeks.

Jane was never sure whether it was five minutes later or five
seconds when somebody in the room spoke--from a chair by the window.

"Do you think," said a mild voice--"do you think you could find me
some bread and butter? Or a glass of milk?"

Jane sat up in bed suddenly. She knew at once that she had made a
mistake, but she was quite dignified about it. She looked over at
the chair, and the convalescent typhoid was sitting in it, wrapped
in a blanket and looking wan and ghostly in the dusk.

"I'm afraid I'm in the wrong room," Jane said very stiffly, trying
to get out of the bed with dignity, which is difficult. "The hall is
dark and all the doors look so alike----"

She made for the door at that and got out into the hall with her
heart going a thousand a minute again.

"You've forgotten your slippers," called the convalescent typhoid
after her. But nothing would have taken Jane back.

The convalescent typhoid took the slippers home later and locked
them away in an inner drawer, where he kept one or two things like
faded roses, and old gloves, and a silk necktie that a girl had made
him at college--things that are all the secrets a man keeps from his
wife and that belong in that small corner of his heart which also
he keeps from his wife. But that has nothing to do with Jane.

Jane went back to her own bed thoroughly demoralised. And sleep
being pretty well banished by that time, she sat up in bed and
thought things over. Before this she had not thought much, only
raged and sulked alternately. But now she thought. She thought about
the man in the room down the hall with the lines of dissipation on
his face. And she thought a great deal about what a silly she had
been, and that it was not too late yet, she being not forty and
"beautiful." It