her account-books from their pigeonholes. Accurate and businesslike,
they should be presented. They were ruled with neat margins, the
columns headed precisely; each quarter of the year showing a
favourable balance in hand. There was no doubt but that she was a
creditable housekeeper. She opened them one by one memorising with a
certain pleasure their tributes to her capacity. One big item had been
wiped off altogether last spring, after her mother's death: the rest
of the furniture instalments, which, on the extended system for which
Osborn had been obliged to arrange after George's birth, would have
dragged on for two years more. Grannie Amber's sale had more than paid
for all.

"He can't say I haven't been careful," she thought. Besides, she was
now a woman with an income of her own; with two hundred and twenty
pounds a year in her pocket, the right to which no man could question.
If he demurred at the maid, and at George's school bills, she could
point to her ability to pay.

She knew how greatly she had changed during their separation; to the
change that might have been wrought in Osborn she gave little,
thought, not caring much. She supposed that he would come home much as
he left it, refreshed doubtless, better-tempered, and full of his
holiday, to the stories of which she would give a dutifully interested
hearing. But that he could ever rouse again in her the passion and
pain which had prostrated her on the night when she knew he was to
leave her was ironically impossible. As she sat over her
account-books, her memory cast back to that evening, how she had
stood, in silent agony, beside the table, sorting over his stock of
clothes; how feverishly and blindly she had sewed, trying to hide from
him all that to-morrow meant to her; how, when he had gone to bed, she
had kneeled by his chair and sobbed, and prayed that no other woman
should ever wean him from her....

What an extraordinary exhibition! What weakness of temper and nerve!

She knew it was more. It had been the terribleness of love.

"And now?" she mused.

It made her smile a little, lazily and serenely.

But now and again she sighed with a sharp envy, thinking of Julia and
Desmond.

She waked often in the solitude of the night, imaging the bride and
bridegroom on the track of rapture, following the unwaning star.

In the morning there was a cablegram for her, reading: "Home on
Thursday.--OSBORN."

To-day was Monday. She stood with tight lips