had the almost immediate effect of dissipating
the strained watchfulness of his look.

"Oh, THAT!" He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it with
the gesture of one who handles something harmless and familiar. "What's
the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I thought you'd got bad news."

She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly under
the reassuring touch of his composure.

"You knew about this, then--it's all right?"

"Certainly I knew about it; and it's all right."

"But what IS it? I don't understand. What does this man accuse you of?"

"Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar." Boyne had tossed the
clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an arm-chair near
the fire. "Do you want to hear the story? It's not particularly
interesting--just a squabble over interests in the Blue Star."

"But who is this Elwell? I don't know the name."

"Oh, he's a fellow I put into it--gave him a hand up. I told you all
about him at the time."

"I daresay. I must have forgotten." Vainly she strained back among her
memories. "But if you helped him, why does he make this return?"

"Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him over.
It's all rather technical and complicated. I thought that kind of thing
bored you."

His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated the
American wife's detachment from her husband's professional interests,
but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention
on Boyne's report of the transactions in which his varied interests
involved him. Besides, she had felt from the first that, in a community
where the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of
efforts as arduous as her husband's professional labors, such brief
leisure as they could command should be used as an escape from immediate
preoccupations, a flight to the life they always dreamed of living. Once
or twice, now that this new life had actually drawn its magic circle
about them, she had asked herself if she had done right; but hitherto
such conjectures had been no more than the retrospective excursions of
an active fancy. Now, for the first time, it startled her a little
to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her
happiness was built.

She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the composure
of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite grounds for her
reassurance.

"But