rough the deep, silky web to the white,
sensitive skin. The woman threw back her head and closed her eyes,
every nerve throbbing felinely under the caress she loved.

The man rose with an uneasy movement that brought him to the back of
her chair. He stooped and whispered something. She flung up her arms
and drew down his face to hers under the white arch they made.

Gibson did nothing scandalous. He went round quietly to the front
door and let himself in with his latch-key. When he entered the
smoking-room he found his wife there alone. She stood on his hearth,
and met him with hard eyes, desperate and defiant.

"What have you to say for yourself?" he said.

"Everything," said she. "Of course you will divorce me."

"Will a separation not satisfy you?"

"No," she said, "it will not. If you haven't had proof enough I can
give you more. Or you can ask the servants."

He had always given her what she wanted. He gave it her now.

II

Gibson went back to his mother.

The incident left him apparently unscathed. He showed no signs of
trouble until four years after, when his mother died. Then the two
shocks rolled into one, and for a year Gibson was a wreck.

At last he was told, as he had been told before, to stop work and go
away--anywhere--for a rest. He went to a small seaside town in East
Devon.

The man's nature was so sound that in a month's time he recovered
sufficiently to take an interest in what was going on around him.

He was lodged in one of a row of small houses facing the esplanade.
Each had its own plot of green garden spread before it, and a
flagged pathway leading from the gate to the door. Path and garden
were raised a good half-foot above the level of the sidewalk, and
this half-foot, Gibson observed, was a serious embarrassment to his
next-door neighbors.

Twice a day a bath-chair with an old gentleman in it would emerge
from the doorway of the house next door. It was drawn by two little
ladies, a dark one and a fair one, whom Gibson judged to be the old
gentleman's daughters. He must have weighed considerably, that old
gentleman, and the ladies (especially the dark one) were far too
young and small and tender for such draft-work. Four times a day at
the garden-gate a struggle took place between little ladies and the
bath-chair. Gibson could see them from his window where he lay,
supine in his nervous apathy. Their going out was only less fearful
than their coming in. Going out, it was v