was before him, and yet he was as powerless to
meet it as the infant in the womb to avert the hour of its birth. Dumb
and petrified by very force of the will within him, he waited immovable
on the spot of carpet, while his eyes saw only the visible wreck of the
woman who stood upon his threshold. His dreams of her had been visions
of horror, but the most pitiable of them had fallen far short of the
reality as he saw it now. From her streaked blonde hair, already
powdered with gray, to her exhausted bedraggled feet, which seemed
hardly to support her trembling body, she stood there, terrible and full
of anguish, like the most tragic ghost of his imaginary horrors. Face to
face with each other they were held speechless by the knowledge that
there was no word by which the past might be justified or the future
made any easier for them to meet; and as in all great instants of life
the thing that was said between them was uttered at last in an unbroken
silence.

Then as they stood there a slight sound changed the atmosphere of the
room. The shade of the lamp, which Adams had raised too high, cracked
with a sharp noise and fell to the floor in broken pieces; and at the
shock Connie gave a hysterical shriek and lifted to Adams the frightened
glance of her ignorant blue eyes.

"I--I had nowhere to go and I am very tired," she said, in her old tone
of childish irritation, "I don't think I was ever so tired in my life
before."

Her voice snapped the icy constraint which held him and he knew now that
he was ready to face the hour on its own terms. His will was as the
strength of the strong, and he felt standing there, that he would ask
no quarter of his fate. Let it be what it would, he knew that it was
powerless to close on him again the door of his prison.

"Then you did right to come back; Connie," he said quietly, "you did
right to come back."

His words rang out almost exultantly, but the moment afterward he was
terrified by their immediate effect--for Connie--throwing herself
forward upon the floor, burst wildly into one of her old spells of
weeping, calling upon God, upon himself, and upon the man whom she had
loved and hated. The frenzied beating of her small, helpless hands, the
streaming of her tears, the quiver of her wrecked, emaciated body, the
convulsed agony that looked at him from her face--these things made
their appeal to that compassion by which he lived, and he found that the
way which he had thought diffi