hen said,
more gravely, "You'll do. Now listen."

He then carefully detailed his plan. There was so little of excitement
or mystery in their manner that the servant, who returned to light the
gas, never knew that the ruin and bankruptcy of the house was being told
before her, or that its mistress was planning her secret flight.

"Good afternoon; I will see you to-morrow then," said Poindexter,
raising his eyes to hers as the servant opened the door for him.

"Good afternoon," repeated Mrs. Tucker quietly answering his look. "You
need not light the gas in my room, Mary," she continued in the same
tone of voice as the door closed upon him; "I shall lie down for a few
moments, and then I may run over to the Robinsons for the evening."

She regained her room composedly. The longing desire to bury her head
in her pillow and "think out" her position had gone. She did not
apostrophize her fate, she did not weep; few real women do in the access
of calamity, or when there is anything else to be done. She felt that
she knew it all; she believed she had sounded the profoundest depths
of the disaster, and seemed already so old in her experience that she
almost fancied she had been prepared for it. Perhaps she did not fully
appreciate it; to a life like hers it was only an incident, the mere
turning of a page of the illimitable book of youth; the breaking up of
what she now felt had become a monotony. In fact, she was not quite sure
she had ever been satisfied with their present success. Had it brought
her all she expected? She wanted to say this to her husband, not only
to comfort him, poor fellow, but that they might come to a better
understanding of life in the future. She was not perhaps different
from other loving women who, believing in this unattainable goal
of matrimony, have sought it in the various episodes of fortune or
reverses, in the bearing of children, or the loss of friends. In her
childless experience there was no other life that had taken root in her
circumstances and might suffer transplantation; only she and her husband
could lose or profit by the change. The "perfect" understanding would
come under other conditions than these.

She would have gone superstitiously to the window to gaze in the
direction of the vanished ship, but another instinct restrained her.
She would put aside all yearning for him until she had done something to
help him, and earned the confidence he seemed to have withheld. Perhaps
it w