etters to his wife,
who, for all he knew, had already half-lost her heart to another man.

The small sitting-room where Brutus, the faithful, awaited his coming,
was more or less a replica of his larger one at Dera Ishmael: the
chronically disordered table, books, pipes, sketches, his inseparable
friends, the bull terrier, and the brown tobacco-jar. All these, the
familiars of his lonely hours, gave him silent greeting as he crossed
the threshold. But for once his spirit failed to respond. The
witchery of his wife's lips and eyes; the distracting music of her
laughter; that one poignant moment of contact with her living,
palpitating self, and Honor Desmond's belief in an undreamed-of
possibility, had kindled the man's repressed passion as a lighted match
kindles dry powder; had revived in him the common human need, which
neither ambition nor work, however absorbing, has yet been known to
satisfy.

"My God," he thought. "If I believed I had a ghost of a chance to get
hold of her again, I'd go back to that infernal ballroom this minute!"

He turned, as if to carry out his resolve: but at the last, shut down
the flood-gates of emotion, fell back on years of self-discipline, and
told his heart he was a fool. He had yet to learn that there is a
folly worth more than all the wisdom of philosophers, the folly of a
man who loves a woman better than his own soul.

Going over to the table, he turned up the lamp, acknowledged the
ponderous jubilations of Brutus, and took the damaged pipe out of his
pocket. Then he stood looking at it thoughtfully, as it lay in the
palm of his hand; an eloquent testimony to that which had been starved,
denied, trampled upon for years,--with this result! Smiling
half-scornfully at his new-found sentimentalism, he put the pieces into
an empty cigarette tin, and thrust it into the top drawer of his table.
As he did so, a strange thought invaded his mind. Some day, perhaps,
he would show it to her; and how delightfully she would laugh at him
for his pardonable foolishness!

But in the meantime the wooing and winning of her still remained to be
achieved; a unique position for a husband!

Absorbed in thoughts evoked by the bare possibility of success, Lenox
mechanically drew out his empty tobacco-pouch, opened the jar, and
thrust a hand into its capacious depths.

Then he started; and two lines of vexation furrowed his forehead. For
his fingers, descending in search of the good brown lea