lancholy, lonely, homesick for
things she could not name.

The waiting woman looked up, and saw her husband. Suddenly, with one
deep breath, all the emptiness of life was a thing, if not of the past,
at least of the background of consciousness.

He was quite close to her by this time, and as she stood there, waiting,
she swept him with her quick and searching gaze. He appeared before her,
in that fleeting moment of impersonal vision, strangely objective, as
completely and acutely visualized as though she had looked upon him for
the first time.

Something in his face wrung her heart, foolishly, something in the
wordless, Rembrandt-like poignancy with which it stood out, through the
cold autumn sunlight of the late afternoon, in its mortal isolation of
soul, its sense of being detached and denied the companionship of its
kind. He looked old and tired. He, too, was voyaging towards some
melancholy autumnal maturity, some sorrowful denudation of youth, that
left him pitiful to her impotently aching heart. He, too, stood in want
of some greater love than even she could ever bring to him, as surely as
she still cried out for the solace of some companionship, not closer than
his, but of a different fiber. She had found herself, of late, vaguely
hungering for some influence less autumnal, less vesper-like, to hold and
wall her back from those grayer hours of retrospection which crept into
her life. Yet this was a secret she had kept always locked in her own
holy of holies. For even in the face of that indeterminate feeling, it
still stabbed her like a knife to think of any thought or life coming
between her and her husband.

She hurried to him, with her habitual little throaty cry, and caught his
arm in hers. The gesture was almost a passionate one.

"Jim, you're working too hard!" she said, as they went on again, arm in
arm.

He studied her upturned face. The pale oval under the great heavy crown
of glinting chestnut seemed paler than usual, the violet eyes seemed more
shadowy. There clung to her a puzzling and unfamiliar sense of fragility.

"What is it?" he asked, coming to a stop.

"I'm worried about _you_!" she cried. "This is the fourth, almost the
fifth month, you've shut yourself up with that transmitter!"

"But it's _work_!" he answered, unmoved.

"Yes, I know, but work without a holiday, without rest----"

"But think what it's going to be to us! All I've got to do now is to get
my selenium ce