d at the telephone.

"Do you mean you struck that child?" I demanded, leaning on the table
and looking straight into his eyes, which met mine quite unabashed,
and with an air of mockery about them.

My husband nodded as he pushed back his chair.

"He got a good one," he asserted as he rose to his feet and rather
leisurely brushed a crumb or two from his vest-front. He could even
afford to smile as he said it. My expression, I suppose, would have
made any man smile. But there was something maddening in his mockery,
at such a moment. There was something gratuitously cruel in his parade
of unconcern. Yet, oddly enough, as I looked at his slightly blotched
face I couldn't help remembering that that was the face I had once
kissed and held close against my cheek, had _wanted_ to hold against
my cheek. And now I hated it.

I had to wait and cast about for words of hatred strong enough to
carry the arrows of enmity which nothing could stop me from
delivering. But while I waited Tokudo announced for the third time
that my husband was wanted at the telephone. And a very simple thing
happened. My husband answered his call.

I saw Duncan turn and walk out of the room. I could hear his steps in
the hallway, loud on the waxed hardwood and low on the rugs. I could
hear his deliberated chest-tones as he talked over the wire, talked
quietly and earnestly, talked me and my hatred out of his head and out
of his world. And I realized, as I sat there at the table-end with my
gloves twisted up under my hands and my heart even more twisted up
under my ribs, that it was all useless, that it was all futile. He was
beyond the reach of my resentment. We were in different worlds,
forevermore.

I was still sitting there when he looked in at the door, with his hat
and coat on, on his way out. I could feel him there, without directly
seeing him. And I could feel, too, that he wanted to say something.
But I declined to lift my head, and I could hear the door close as he
went out to the waiting car.

I sat there for a long time, thinking about my Dinkie. Twice I almost
surrendered to the impulse to telephone to Lossie Brown. But I knew it
would be no easy matter to get in touch with her. And in two hours it
would be twelve, and any minute after that my boy would be home again.
I tried to cross-examine Tokudo, but I could get nothing out of that
tight-lipped Jap. I watched the clock. I noticed Hilton, when he got
back, raking blood-stains off t