licious to find, for the first time in her life, this intimate
sympathy.

"I wish my wife had possessed your friendship," he said. "I believe you
would have saved us." He passed his hands over his brow, looking round
at the closed windows of the drawing-room. "I almost feel as if she were
near us now on this old terrace that she loved so. She planted these
roses herself--how they have grown!" They were white cluster roses and
yellow banksias, which had strayed far along the balustrade, clambering
among the stone pillars.

"You doubtless know the bare facts of her life, but nothing is so
misleading as bare fact. My wife was one of the positive natures,
capable of great nobility, but liable to glaring error and sin! She held
ideas passionately. She had the old barbaric notion that a husband was a
sort of master, and must assert his authority and rights. It was the
result of her training. I saw that a great development was before her. I
pleased myself with the thought of watching and helping it. She was
built on a grand scale. To set her free from prejudice, from her
injustice to herself, from her dependence on me; to teach her to breathe
deep with those big lungs of hers and think bravely with that capacious
brain: that was my dream. I hoped to hear her say to me some day, what I
fear no woman has yet been able to say to her husband, 'The day of our
marriage was the birthday of my freedom.'"

Hadria drew a long breath. It seemed to overwhelm her that a man, even
the Professor, could utter such a sentiment. All the old hereditary
instincts of conquest and ownership appeared to be utterly dead in him.

No wonder he had found life a lonely pilgrimage! He lived before his
time. His wife had taunted him because he would not treat her as his
legal property, or rule her through the claims and opportunities that
popular sentiment assigned to him.

When a woman as generous as himself, as just, as gentle-hearted, had
appeared on the horizon of the world, the advent of a nobler social
order might be hoped for. The two were necessary for the new era.

Then, not only imagination, but cold reason herself grew eloquent with
promises.

"It was in there, in the old drawing-room, where we had sat together
evening after evening, that they found her dead, the very type of all
that is brilliant and exquisite and living. To me she was everything.
All my personal happiness was centred in her. I cared for nothing so
long as she was in th