f temptation by refusing to see Martin alone.

For three or four days I did my best to carry out this purpose, making
one poor excuse after another, when (as happened several times a day) he
came down to see me--that I was just going out or had just come in, or
was tired or unwell.

It was tearing my heart out to deny myself so, but I think I could have
borne the pain if I had not realised that I was causing pain to him
also.

My maid, whose head was always running on Martin, would come hack to my
room, after delivering one of my lying excuses, and say:

"You should have seen his face, when I told him you were ill. It was
just as if I'd driven a knife into him."

Everybody seemed to be in a conspiracy to push me into Martin's
arms--Alma above all others. Being a woman she read my secret, and I
could see from the first that she wished to justify her own conduct in
relation to my husband by putting me into the same position with Martin.

"Seen Mr. Conrad to-day?" she would ask.

"Not to-day," I would answer.

"Really? And you such old friends! And staying in the same hotel, too!"

When she saw that I was struggling hard she reminded my husband of his
intention of asking Martin to dinner, and thereupon a night was fixed
and a party invited.

Martin came, and I was only too happy to meet him in company, though the
pain and humiliation of the contrast between him and my husband and his
friends, and the difference of the atmosphere in which he lived from
that to which I thought I was doomed for ever, was almost more than I
could bear.

I think they must have felt it themselves, for though their usual
conversation was of horses and dogs and race-meetings, I noticed they
were silent while Martin in his rugged, racy poetic way (for all
explorers are poets) talked of the beauty of the great Polar night, the
cloudless Polar day, the midnight calm and the moonlight on the
glaciers, which was the loveliest, weirdest, most desolate, yet most
entrancing light the world could show.

"I wonder you don't think of going back to the Antarctic, if it's so
fascinating," said Alma.

"I do. Bet your life I do," said Martin, and then he told them what he
had told me on the launch, but more fully and even more rapturously--the
story of his great scheme for saving life and otherwise benefiting
humanity.

For hundreds of years man, prompted merely by the love of adventure, the
praise of achievement, and the desire to know the glo