, since I'm the cause of it. Do you feel you're
doing anything very terrible? Here--put your arms round my
neck--kiss me--God bless your little heart--you couldn't do anything
terrible. Now, are we going to sit and mope, or shall we go out to
supper?"

That meant that they were going to supper, and in half an hour she
was as happy again as a child.

For the first of the three years they passed through an incessant
round of amusements, going abroad every few months, once bicycling
all through France from North to South and then returning by train,
spending a week in Paris. Their method of living was frugal, and
Sally's demands amounted practically to nothing. For the whole of
that year, Traill had sunned himself in the warm delight of her
simplicity. The years when he was alone had brought with them a
certain amount of cynicism, a definite trace of bitterness. But with
Sally, he forgot all that--threw from his shoulders the years that
solitude had added to his age and became the man of thirty-six who
still looks youth in the eyes without question.

Then he had shaken himself and awakened to the broad responsibilities
of life. A small case was offered him in the courts. Such cases he
had refused before; now Sally urged him to accept it and he obeyed,
looking rather to the future than her immediate prompting. So began
the seriousness of his career as a barrister. The second year only
brought one other small brief with it; but both cases were won. Then
he began to specialize in divorce and finally, contact with a
well-known solicitor which had come through the medium of journalism,
brought him his first brief in the probate and divorce division. The
case was rather a big one and he was not the leading counsel, but
the assistance he gave was deemed of such value, that the next brief
from the solicitor was given entirely to him.

Sally came down to the courts and listened to his cross-examination
of the woman who against a thousand incriminating circumstances was
fighting, with white lips and piteously hunted eyes, to keep her name
from the mud into which Traill was striving to drag it.

There she saw the cruelty in him again. It was impossible for her,
listening with every sense taut to the uttermost, to obliterate the
personal element, to think that he was merely a machine grinding,
in the course of his duty, as the implacable mills crush the yielding
grain into the listless powder of flour.

"Didn't it strike you a