emain here but I couldn't possibly accept that
sacrifice; for all your interests lie in New York, as you stated in your
letter to me. You still have your apartments there, you tell me, and to
let you bury yourself down here in this lonely place would be simply
outrageous. Even Peggy has been here too long, without companions."

Neil Stewart paused to take some nuts from the dish which Jerome, now
recovered and beaming, held for him. Mrs. Stewart could have screamed
with baffled rage, for, now that it was too late, she saw that she had
quite overshot the mark, and given her brother-in-law a complete
advantage over her designs. "And that hateful, designing cat!" as she
stigmatized Mrs. Harold "had completed her defeat." She had gauged her
brother-in-law as "a perfect simpleton where a woman was concerned," and
never had she so miscalculated. He _was_ easygoing when at home on
leave, or off on one of his outings, as he had been when she met him in
New London. Why not? When he worked he worked with every particle of
energy he possessed, but when he "loafed," as he expressed it, he cast
all care to the winds and was like an emancipated school-boy. It was the
school-boy side of his nature she had gauged. She knew nothing of Neil
Stewart the Naval Officer and man; hadn't the very faintest conception
of his latent force once it was stirred. And she little guessed how she
_had_ stirred it by her letter written the morning she had made Peggy so
unhappy. It was the one touch needed to bring the climax and it had
brought it with a rush which Mrs. Peyton had little anticipated. What
the outcome might have been had Neil Stewart not met Mrs. Harold on that
train is impossible to surmise further than that he had fully decided to
free himself of all connection with Peyton's widow. He had always
disliked and distrusted her, but now he detested her. Peggy's letters
had revealed far more than she guessed, though they had not held one
intended criticism. She had written just as she had written ever since
she promised him when he visited her the previous year, to send "a
report of each day, accurate as a ship's log." But she could not write
of the daily happenings without giving him a pretty graphic picture of
Mrs. Stewart's gradual usurpation, and Harrison had felt no compunction
in expressing _her_ views.

And so the "best laid plans o' mice and (wo)men" had "gone agley" in a
demoralizing manner, and Neil Stewart had come down to Severndal