nly almost impossible when he remembered that from a forlornly
foolish caprice she had plunged him into a debt of several years. He had
worked hard, with broken health, in a profession of small financial
returns, but to his own simple tastes his income might have brought not
only perfect material ease, but the enjoyment of comparative luxury.
Still there was Connie--he had always in every situation remembered that
there was Connie--and in order to insure her present comfort as well as
to provide for her future livelihood, he had contrived to limit his
expenses to the merest necessities. One only gratification he had
allowed himself--his eyes travelled gloomily round his precious
book-lined walls and he found himself wondering if those particular
treasures would bring their full value in the open market? He regarded
them meditatively, almost religiously, with the impassioned eye of the
collector who is born not cultivated. Yet there were among them no
high-priced, particular rarities, for he had always counted the cost
with the deliberation which he felt to be the better part of impulse.
Financially they did not represent a great deal, he admitted; then, as
if flinching before a threatened sacrilege, he looked away again, while
he remembered with a quick recognition of the ludicrous, that among the
articles for which Connie had not paid was a pair of pearl ear-rings.
The item had taken a prominence oddly out of keeping with its
significance, and he found that it irritated him more than the thought
of objects of a decidedly greater cost. That any woman, that his wife in
particular, should want a pair of ear-rings appeared to him little short
of the barbaric.

But the incident was trifling, and a minute later it had faded entirely
from his reflections. As he sat there in his easy-chair in the lamp
light his thoughts turned slowly backward, travelling over the tragic
yet uneventful history of his life. He remembered his childhood on a
little Western farm, the commonplace poverty of his people, and his own
burning, agonised ambition, which had sent him through college on a
pittance, swept the highest honours from his graduation year, and
wrecked at last what had been at his starting out a fairly promising
physical constitution. He recalled, too, the sleepless enthusiasm of
his last term at Harvard, the terrible exhaustion which had made his
final triumph barren, and the long illness which had brought him in the
end, with sha