hand, where the veins
looked strangely blue through the delicate whiteness of the flesh. But
she never complained. When her husband brought her flowers and presents,
as he still liked to do, she took them gently, and thanked him; but he
noticed that she laid them aside and seldom looked at them again. The
spirit seemed to have gone out of her. And in his own heart Sydney raged
and fretted--for why, he said to himself, should she not be like other
women?--why, if she had a grudge against him, should she not tell him
so? She might reproach him as bitterly as she pleased; the storm would
spend itself in time and break in sunshine; but this terrible silence
was like a nightmare about them both! He wished that he had the courage
to break through it, but he was experiencing the truth of the saying
that conscience makes cowards of us all, and he dared not break the
silence that she had imposed.

One day, when he had brought her some flowers, she put them away from
her with a slight unusual sign of impatience.

"Don't bring me any more," she said.

Her husband looked at her intently. "You don't care for them?"

"No."

"I thought," he said, a little mortification struggling with natural
disappointment in his breast, "that I had heard you say you liked
them--or, at any rate, that you liked me to bring them----"

"That was long ago," she answered softly, but coldly. She lay with her
eyes closed, her face very pale and weary.

"One would think," he went on, spurred by puzzled anger to put a long
unspoken thought into bare words, "that you did not care for me
now--that you did not love me any longer?"

She opened her eyes and looked at him steadily. There was something
almost like pity in her face.

"I am afraid it is true, Sydney. I am very sorry."

He stood staring at her a little longer, as if he could not believe his
ears. The red blood slowly mounted to his forehead. She returned his
gaze with the same look of almost wistful pity, in which there was an
aloofness, a coldness, that showed him as nothing else had ever done the
extent of her estrangement from himself. Somehow he felt as though she
had struck him on the lips. He walked away from her without another
word, and shut himself into his study, where he sat for some minutes at
his writing-table, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing, dumbly conscious
that he was, on the whole, more wretched than he had ever been in the
course of a fairly prosperous and successful