doesn't this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me about
it?"

He answered both questions at once: "I didn't speak of it at first
because it DID worry me--annoyed me, rather. But it's all ancient
history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number of
the 'Sentinel.'"

She felt a quick thrill of relief. "You mean it's over? He's lost his
case?"

There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne's reply. "The suit's been
withdrawn--that's all."

But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge of
being too easily put off. "Withdrawn because he saw he had no chance?"

"Oh, he had no chance," Boyne answered.

She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her
thoughts.

"How long ago was it withdrawn?"

He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty. "I've
just had the news now; but I've been expecting it."

"Just now--in one of your letters?"

"Yes; in one of my letters."

She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of
waiting, that he had risen, and strolling across the room, had placed
himself on the sofa at her side. She felt him, as he did so, pass an arm
about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp it, and turning slowly,
drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met the smiling clearness of his
eyes.

"It's all right--it's all right?" she questioned, through the flood of
her dissolving doubts; and "I give you my word it never was righter!" he
laughed back at her, holding her close.

III

One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all the
next day's incredible strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery
of her sense of security.

It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it
accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at her
from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from the flanks of the
urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian teapot. It was as if, in
some roundabout way, all her diffused apprehensions of the previous
day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper
article,--as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return
upon the past,--had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting
moral obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband's
affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith in him
instinctively justified such carelessness; and his ri