istence was over before she was born. Yet women seemed more in earnest
now than ever before. He said to himself, "I have always picked out
natures as fatal to me as a death-warrant, and fastened my life to
them."

The thought stabbed him that perhaps his wife, whom he had believed
satisfied, had carried such hopeless anguish as he now carried. Tardy
remorse for what he could not help gave him the feeling of a murderer.
And since he knew himself how little may be given under the bond of
marriage, he could not look forward and say, "My love will yet be mine!"

He would, indeed, have society on his side; and children--he drew his
breath hard at that. Her ways with children were divine. He had often
watched her instinctive mothering of, and drawing them around her. And
it should be much to him that he might look at and, touch her. There was
life in her mere presence.

He felt the curse of the artistic temperament, which creates in man the
exquisite sensitiveness of woman.

Taking the longest and hardest path home around the eastern beach,
Maurice turned once on impulse, parted a screen of birches, and stepped
into an amphitheatre of the cliff, moss-clothed and cedar-walled. It
sloped downward in three terraces. A balcony or high parapet of stone
hung on one side, a rock low and broad stood in the centre, and an
unmistakable chair of rock, cushioned with vividly green-branched moss,
waited an occupant. Maurice sat down, wondering if any other human
being, perplexed and tortured, had ever domiciled there for a brief
time. Slim alder-trees and maples were clasped in moss to their waists.
The spacious open was darkened by dense shade overhead. Bois Blanc was
plainly in view from the beach. But the eastern islands stretched a line
of foliage in growing dusk. Maurice felt the cooling benediction of the
place. This world is such a good world to be happy in, if you have the
happiness.

When the light faded he went on, climbing low headlands which jutted
into the water, and sliding down on the other side; so that he reached
the hotel physically exhausted, and had his dinner sent to his room. But
a vitality constantly renewing itself swept away every trace of his hard
day when he entered the gayly lighted casino.

He no longer danced, not because dancing ceased to delight him, but
because the serious business of life had left no room for it. He walked
along the waxed floor, avoiding the circling procession of waltzers,
and bow