urself! Don't be a goat!"

Did she see for herself? Oh, yes. She hadn't loved the young
gentleman, not really. She had liked him enough to get over you being
a life and death matter to her. That was all. She had liked him
enough to let him kiss her at parting. That must have been what Mr.
Fulton had caught them at.

"But, Hilda," I interrupted, "why didn't he tell me that it was all
over, when I saw him in New York--just before Christmas?"

"Well, they couldn't know how you felt, could they? Maybe he wanted
you to have your full year. Maybe he thought you'd fall down as she
had, and that she'd hear of it and that it would be a lesson to her.
How should _I_ know?"

She told me more. The very night of the young gentleman's departure,
late, a telegram had come to Mr. Fulton. She, Hilda, had gone down to
the front door, signed for the telegram, and carried it to Mr. Fulton's
room. He did not answer to her first light knock; nor to a first or
second loud knock. She pushed the door open. The room was full of
moonlight. Mr. Fulton's bed was empty. It had not been slept in.

Hilda tiptoed to the end of the corridor, laid the telegram on the
floor in front of Mrs. Fulton's door, knocked very firmly, and the
moment she heard someone stirring within, turned upon her heel and fled.

So much for the average strength of those grand passions upon which so
many marriages are wrecked!

"Are they happy now, Hilda--the way they used to be?"

Oh no, not happy, fairly contented. She would never love him the way
she used to. Her fantastics [Transcriber's note: fantasies?] had taken
the beauty plumb out of their lives. But something remained. A loving
husband, an unloving, but naturally kind, good-natured and affectionate
wife, trying to do her duty by the two children that were and the one
that was to be.

"Oh, Mr. Mannering," said Hilda; "you mustn't blame yourself too much.
If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else. I didn't think
so, but now I do. And _he_ might not have been a gentleman."

XXXV

We had dinner on the terrace of the Tamerlane Inn, overlooking the
Sound.

"But, Hilda," I was arguing, toward coffee, "we might have gone on
caring forever--if we hadn't been separated. Propinquity feeds love;
absence starves it."

"Love? Indeed it doesn't. Fancy? Yes."

She looked straight in my eyes.

"Hilda," I said, "you--you don't still--that way--about me?"

"Don't I?" she s