her
tongue. They came at last, however, and he heard her say:

"I wish I could weep, if only to show you I am not utterly devoid of
womanly sympathy for an anguish I cannot cure. But the fountain of my
tears is dried at its source. I do not think I can ever weep again. I am
condemned to tread a path of misery and despair, and must traverse it to
the end without weakness and without help. Do not ask me why, for I can
never tell you. And do not detain me now, or try to make me talk, for I
must go where I can be alone and silent."

She was slipping away, but he caught her by the wrist and drew her back.
His pain and perplexity had reached their climax.

"You must speak," he cried. "I have paltered long enough with this
matter. You must tell me what it is that is destroying your happiness
and mine."

But her eyes, turning toward him, seemed to echo that _must_ in a look
of disdain eloquent enough to scorn all help from words, and in the
indomitable determination of her whole aspect he saw that he might slay
her, but that he could never make her speak.

Loosing her with a gesture of despair, he turned away. When he glanced
back again she was gone.

The result of this interview was naturally an increased doubt and
anxiety on his part. He could not attend to his duties with any degree
of precision, he was so haunted by uneasy surmises as to what might have
been the contents of the letter which he had thus seen her destroy
before his eyes. As for her words, they were like her conduct, an
insolvable mystery, for which he had no key.

His failure to find her at home when he returned that night added to his
alarm, especially as he remembered the vivid thunderstorm that had
deluged the town in the afternoon. Nor, though she came in very soon and
offered both excuses and explanations for her absence, did he experience
any appreciable relief, or feel at all satisfied that he was not
threatened with some secret and terrible catastrophe. Indeed, the air of
vivid and feverish excitement which pervaded every look of hers from
this time, making each morning and evening distinctive in his memory as
a season of fresh fear and renewed suspense, was enough of itself to
arouse this sense of an unknown, but surely approaching, danger. He saw
she was on the look out for some event, he knew not what, and studied
the papers as sedulously as she, in the hope of coming upon some
revelation that should lay bare the secret of this new conditi