o
ready for love; that when I wake up tomorrow she will still be here."

Disarmed and partly appeased by the frankness of his confession, Mrs.
Wade sat silently taking in each word, studying him with wet eyes, her
lips almost blue, her breath a little short. The fire in his voice, the
reality of his strange, terrible love, the eyes that gazed so sadly and
so unexpectantly into space, the hands that seemed to have shed their
weight of toil and clutched, too late, for the bright flowers of
happiness--all filled her with compassion. Never had he looked so
splendid. He seemed, in casting off his thongs, to have taken on some of
the Herculean quality of his own magnificent gesture. It was as if their
barnyard well had burst into a mighty, high-shooting geyser. To her
dying day would she remember that surge of passion. To have met it with
anger would have been of as little avail as the stamp of a protesting
foot before the tremors of an earthquake.

She offered him the comforting directness which she might have given
Bill. "I didn't know you felt so deeply, Martin. Life plays us all
tricks; it's played many with me, and it's playing one of its meanest
with you, for whatever happens you are going to suffer--far more than I
am. You can believe it or not, but I'm sorry."

Martin felt oddly grateful to her; he had not expected this sense of
understanding. She might have burst into wild tears. Instead, she was
pitying him. More possessed of his usual immobility, he remarked:

"I must be a fool, a great, pathetic fool. I look into a girl's eyes and
immediately see visions. I say a few words to her and she is kind enough
to say a few to me and I see pictures of new happiness. I should have
more sense. I don't know what is the matter with me."

Although countless answers leaped to his wife's tongue she made none but
the cryptic: "Well, it's no use to discuss it any more tonight. We both
need rest." But all the while that she was undressing with her usual
sure, swift movements, and after she had finally slipped between the
sheets, her mind was racing.

She was soon borne so completely out on the current of her own thoughts
that she forgot Martin's actual presence. She remembered as if it were
yesterday, the afternoon he came to the office and asked her to marry
him. She wondered anew, as she had wondered a thousand times, if
anything other than a wish for a housekeeper had prompted him. She
remembered her misgivings--how she had