ther, and in the midst of my efforts to comfort her, she spied
the feminine handwriting on those two letters. I had glanced through
them hurriedly, and laid them on the table.

"Tom, I was in bad. The dates on them, you know, were so RECENT. I
didn't want Lucy to read them. But I didn't dare to ACT as if I didn't
want her to. So I handed them over.

"I suppose--to a bride who had only been married a little more than a
week--and who had hurt her grandfather nearly to death in the marrying,
those letters must have sounded rather odd. I tried to explain. But
all my explanations only seemed to make the case worse for me. Lucy was
furiously jealous. We really had a devil of a row before we were through
with it. I tried to tell her that I loved no one but her. She pointed
out that I must have said much the same sort of thing to Emma. She said
she was almost as sorry for Emma as she was for herself. When Lucy
got through with me, Tom, I looked like thirty cents and felt like
twenty-five of that was plugged.

"I didn't have sense enough to know that it was most of it grief over
her grandfather, and nerves and hysteria, and the fact that she was
only eighteen years old and lonely, and that being a bride had a certain
amount to do with it. She had told me that I was a beast, and made me
feel like one; and I took the whole thing hard and believed her. I made
a fine, five-act tragedy out of a jealous fit I might have softened into
comedy if I had had the wit.

"I wasn't so very old myself, and I hadn't ever been married before. I
should have kept my mouth shut until it was all over, and then when she
began to cry I should have coaxed her up and made her feel like I was
the only solid thing to hang on to in the whole world.

"But the bottom had dropped out of the universe for me. She had said she
hated me. I was fool enough to believe her. I went downtown and began
to drink. I come home late that night. The poor girl had been waiting up
for me--waiting for hours, and becoming more and more frightened when I
didn't show up. She was over her jealous fit, I suppose. If I had come
home in good shape, or in anything like it, we would have made up then
and there. But my condition stopped all that. I wasn't so drunk but that
I saw her face change when she let me in. She was disgusted.

"In the morning I was sick and feverish. I was more than disgusted with
myself. I was in despair. If she had hated me before--and she had said
she did