e said: "you have to
be perfect only to one person. Now, what was it you were going to say
about love?"

Again they looked at each other; again Miss Severance had the sensation
of drowning, of being submerged in some strange elixir.

She was rescued by Pringle's opening the door and announcing:

"Mr. Lanley."

Wayne stood up.

"I suppose I must go," he said.

"No, no," she returned a little wildly, and added, as if this were
the reason why she opposed his departure. "This is my grandfather. You
must see him."

Wayne sat down again, in the chair on the other side of the tea-table.

CHAPTER II

Mathilde had been wrong in telling Wayne that her mother had gone
upstairs in obedience to an impulse of kindness. She had gone to quiet a
small, gnawing anxiety that had been with her all the day, a haunting,
elusive, persistent impression that something was wrong between her and
her husband.

All the day, as she had gone about from one thing to another, her mind
had been diligently seeking in some event of the outside world an
explanation of a slight obscuration of his spirit; but her heart, more
egotistical, had stoutly insisted that the cause must lie in her. Did he
love her less? Was she losing her charm for him? Were five years the
limit of a human relation like theirs? Was she to watch the dying down of
his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had seen so
many other women do?

Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had never
been a calm one. Farron's interests were concentrated, and his
temperament was jealous. A woman couldn't, as Adelaide sometimes had
occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did not
always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without a
certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for they
ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a fresh
sense of his supremacy.

If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed that
something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she had
always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the full
history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, "Has anything gone
wrong, Joe?"