xpression--even the tight sleeves and the two boys may make her all the
more attractive!"

Wilton got up.

"Good-bye," he said. "You're perverse. It's no use, I see, telling you
not to worry; but please try to realise there's no occasion."

"Wouldn't you say just the same if you thought there had been occasion?"
she persisted.

"Absolutely. But that doesn't prove I'm not sincere now."

He pressed her hand with a look that he hoped conveyed the highest
respect, the tenderest sympathy, a deep, though carefully suppressed
passion, and a longing to administer some refined and courteous
consolation, and went away.

Wilton was only twenty-five, so, naturally, as soon as he got home, he
tried the expression in the mirror, and was horribly disappointed in it.

"I must have looked as if I'd suddenly got an awful twinge of
neuralgia," he said to himself.

"It shows how careful one ought to be. Confound it!"

* * * * *

Felicity, however, was not troubling herself about Wilton or his
expressive looks. The complicated glance, which he feared was a failure,
had not even been seen by her. What he had said cheered her for the
moment, and _au fond_, at the back of her brain, with her real sound
common sense, she did not actually believe in the cause of her grief.
But passion and jealousy, unfortunately, are not governed by sound
common sense; they work in circles. Argument and reasoning have but a
temporary effect on them; they come back to the point at which they
started.

As she looked at Mrs. Tregelly's picture, the feverish chills of
suspicion again took possession of her. She told herself repeatedly that
she had only been married a year, that Chetwode was in love with her,
and had always seemed cold to other women. But he was continually away.
He was charming and attractive. Perhaps the other women he met thought
_she_ lived for amusement and was utterly neglectful of him. She was
afraid she had been imprudent in being seen so much with Wilton, but
Chetwode never seemed, really, to mind. He trusted her as she deserved,
and as she ought to trust him. Considering the terms that they were
on--far more like lovers than husband and wife--it would be real
treachery on his part. He was incapable of treachery. She would trust
him.

Then the image of Chetwode making love to that pretty woman abruptly
forced itself on her mental vision in spite of all reasoning, like a
sudden violent physical p