d been often, before
now, ridiculously jealous; but you could not, apparently, live with a
woman without getting very fond of her--he couldn't--especially if she
had given you a child; and if Daphne had turned against him now, for a
bit--well, he could not swear to himself that he had been free from
blame; and it perhaps served him right for having gone out deliberately
to the States to marry money--with a wife thrown in--in that shabby sort
of way.

But, now, to straighten out this coil; to shake himself finally free of
Chloe, and make Daphne happy again! He vowed to himself that he could
and would make her happy--just as she had been in their early days
together. The memory of her lying white and exhausted after child-birth,
with the little dark head beside her, came across him, and melted him;
he thought of her with longing and tenderness.

With a deep breath he raised himself on his seat; in the old Greek
phrase, "the gods breathed courage into his soul"; and as he stretched
out an indifferent hand toward Chloe's letters on the trunk, Roger
Barnes had perhaps reached the highest point of his moral history; he
had become conscious of himself as a moral being choosing good or evil;
and he had chosen good. It was not so much that his conscience accused
him greatly with regard to Chloe. For that his normal standards were not
fine enough. It was rather a kind of "serious call," something akin to
conversion, or that might have been conversion, which befell him in this
dusty room, amid the night-silence.

As he took up Chloe's letters he did not notice that the door had
quietly opened behind him, and that a figure stood on the threshold.

A voice struck into the stillness.

"Roger!"

He turned with a movement that scattered all his own letters on the
floor. Daphne stood before him--but with the eyes of a mad woman. Her
hand shook on the handle of the door.

"What are you doing here?" She flung out the question like a blow.

"Hallo, Daphne!--is that you?" He tried to laugh. "I'm only looking up
some old papers; no joke, in all this rubbish." He pointed to it.

"What old papers?"

"Well, you needn't catechize me!" he said, nettled by her tone, "or not
in that way, at any rate. I couldn't sleep, and I came up here to look
for something I wanted. Why did you shut your door on me?"

He looked at her intently, his lips twitching a little. Daphne came
nearer.

"It must be something you want very badly--something yo