was
indifferent as to the hour of her return; but she had not long been
gone before he followed. Insufferable misery possessed him. His married
life threatened to terminate in utter wreck, and he had the anguish of
recognizing that to a great extent this catastrophe would be his own
fault. Resolve as he might, he found it impossible to repress the
impulses of jealousy which, as soon as peace had been declared between
them, brought about a new misunderstanding. Terrible thoughts
smouldered in his mind; he felt himself to be one of those men who are
driven by passion into crime. Deliberately he had brooded over a tragic
close to the wretchedness of his existence; he would kill himself, and
Monica should perish with him. But an hour of contentment sufficed to
banish such visions as sheer frenzy. He saw once more how harmless, how
natural, were Monica's demands, and how peacefully he might live with
her but for the curse of suspicion from which he could not free
himself. Any other man would deem her a model wifely virtue. Her care
of the house was all that reason could desire. In her behaviour he had
never detected the slightest impropriety. He believed her chaste as any
woman living She asked only to be trusted, and that, in spite of all,
was beyond his power.

In no woman on earth could he have put perfect confidence. He regarded
them as born to perpetual pupilage. Not that their inclinations were
necessarily wanton; they were simply incapable of attaining maturity,
remained throughout their life imperfect beings, at the mercy of craft,
ever liable to be misled by childish misconceptions. Of course he was
right; he himself represented the guardian male, the wife-proprietor,
who from the dawn of civilization has taken abundant care that woman
shall not outgrow her nonage. The bitterness of his situation lay in
the fact that he had wedded a woman who irresistibly proved to him her
claims as a human being. Reason and tradition contended in him, to his
ceaseless torment.

And again, he feared that Monica did not love him. Had she ever loved
him? There was too much ground for suspecting that she had only yielded
to the persistence of his entreaties, with just liking enough to permit
a semblance of tenderness, and glad to exchange her prospect of
distasteful work for a comfortable married life. Her liking he might
have fostered; during those first happy weeks, assuredly he had done
so, for no woman could be insensible to the