measure of feminine self-respect as
ridiculously inadequate, and to seek some other measure.
Susan had sought this other measure, and had found it. She
was, therefore, not a little surprised to find--after Freddie
had been back three or four days--that he was arousing in her
the same sensations which a strange man intimately about would
have aroused in her in the long past girlhood of innocence.
It was not physical repulsion; it was not a sense of
immorality. It was a kind of shyness, a feeling of violated
modesty. She felt herself blushing if he came into the room
when she was dressing. As soon as she awakened in the morning
she sprang from bed beside him and hastened into her
dressing-room and closed the door, resisting an impulse to
lock it. Apparently the feeling of physical modesty which she
had thought dead, killed to the last root, was not dead, was
once more stirring toward life.

"What are you blushing about?" asked he, when she, passing
through the bedroom, came suddenly upon him, very scantily dressed.

She laughed confusedly and beat a hurried retreat. She began
to revolve the idea of separate bedrooms; she resolved that
when they moved again she would arrange it on some
pretext--and she was looking about for a new place on the plea
that their quarters in Half Moon Street were too cramped. All
this close upon his return, for it was before the end of the
first week that she, taking a shower bath one morning, saw the
door of the bathroom opening to admit him, and cried out sharply:

"Close that door!"

"It's I," Freddie called, to make himself heard above the
noise of the water. "Shut off that water and listen."

She shut off the water, but instead of listening, she said,
nervous but determined:

"Please close the door. I'll be out directly."

"Listen, I tell you," he cried, and she now noticed that his
voice was curiously, arrestingly, shrill.

"Brent--has been hurt--badly hurt." She was dripping wet.
She thrust her arms into her bathrobe, flung wide the partly
open door. He was standing there, a newspaper in his
trembling hand. "This is a dispatch from New York--dated
yesterday," he began. "Listen," and he read:

"During an attempt to rob the house of Mr. Robert Brent, the
distinguished playwright, early this morning, Mr. Brent was
set upon and stabbed in a dozen places, his butler, James
Fourget, was wounded, perhaps mortally, and his secretary, Mr.
J. C. Garvey, was knocked in