ver been
happiness. After this she was going to know everything as she used.

She tried to dismiss the whole matter till Lapham returned; and if
there had been anything for her to do in that miserable house, as she
called it in her thought, she might have succeeded. But again the
curse was on her; there was nothing to do; and the looks of that girl
kept coming back to her vacancy, her disoccupation. She tried to make
herself something to do, but that beauty, which she had not liked,
followed her amid the work of overhauling the summer clothing, which
Irene had seen to putting away in the fall. Who was the thing, anyway?
It was very strange, her being there; why did she jump up in that
frightened way when Mrs. Lapham had named herself?

After dark, that evening, when the question had worn away its poignancy
from mere iteration, a note for Mrs. Lapham was left at the door by a
messenger who said there was no answer. "A note for me?" she said,
staring at the unknown, and somehow artificial-looking, handwriting of
the superscription. Then she opened it and read: "Ask your husband
about his lady copying-clerk. A Friend and Well-wisher," who signed
the note, gave no other name.

Mrs. Lapham sat helpless with it in her hand. Her brain reeled; she
tried to fight the madness off; but before Lapham came back the second
morning, it had become, with lessening intervals of sanity and release,
a demoniacal possession. She passed the night without sleep, without
rest, in the frenzy of the cruellest of the passions, which covers with
shame the unhappy soul it possesses, and murderously lusts for the
misery of its object. If she had known where to find her husband in
New York, she would have followed him; she waited his return in an
ecstasy of impatience. In the morning he came back, looking spent and
haggard. She saw him drive up to the door, and she ran to let him in
herself.

"Who is that girl you've got in your office, Silas Lapham?" she
demanded, when her husband entered.

"Girl in my office?"

"Yes! Who is she? What is she doing there?"

"Why, what have you heard about her?"

"Never you mind what I've heard. Who is she? IS IT MRS. M. THAT YOU
GAVE THAT MONEY TO? I want to know who she is! I want to know what a
respectable man, with grown-up girls of his own, is doing with such a
looking thing as that in his office? I want to know how long she's been
there? I want to know what she's there at all for?"

He h