n who
had come to mean more for him than anything else had ever meant--more, he
knew, than anything else could mean.

He was not sure whether the love in his heart was a punishment or a
blessing, but there it was. It had come to stay.

"This woman to this man!"

He found himself repeating the words he remembered best in the marriage
service, not bitterly as he had repeated them to Annesley, but
yearningly, clingingly, groping after some promise of hope in them.

"She gave herself to me. I'm the same man she loved, after all, though
she says I'm not," he told himself. "God! What's the good of being a man
at all, if I can't get her back?"

As he wandered through one winter-saddened garden after another--the
Italian garden, the Dutch garden, the rose garden--he searched his soul,
asking it how much more he should have to tell the girl about his past.
In a kind of desperate resignation he persuaded himself that there was
nothing he would not be willing to tell her now, if it were for her good,
and if she wished to hear.

But something within him said that she would wish to hear no more. She
would deign to put no questions to him, even if she felt curiosity. She
would doubtless refuse to listen if he volunteered a further confession.
He was instinctively sure of his ground there; and in his bitterness of
spirit there was a faint gleam of comfort; certain details of his
degradation (she would think it that) might be kept decently hidden.

For instance, he would not have to tell her how, as a boy in Chicago, he
had learned to make strange use of those clever, nervous hands of his,
which she had lovingly praised as "sensitive and artistic." He could
almost see the girl shudder and grow pale at hearing how proud he had
been at sixteen of being admitted to friendship with a "swell mobsman"
fascinating as any "Raffles" of fiction; how it had amused the fellow to
teach him a deft and delicate touch, beginning his lessons with the game
of jack-straws, in which he was given prizes if he could separate the
whole stack, one straw from another, without disturbing the balance of
the pile.

It would gain him no credit in Annesley's eyes if he should assure her
that, though he knew how to pick pockets--none better--he had somehow
never cared to put his skill in practice, but had always preferred,
leaving that part of the industry to others. No excuse could help him
with her, and he was glad she need not know all the ways in which