chagrined and ill at ease. It was rather late for her to be out alone!
After all, what did he know of her habits or associations? He recalled
the freedom of Californian life, and the old scandals relating to the
lapses of many women who had previously led blameless lives in the
Atlantic States. Clearly it behooved him to be cautious. Yet he
walked late that night before the house again, eager to see if she had
returned, and with WHOM? He was restricted in his eagerness by the
fear of detection, but he gathered very little knowledge of her habits;
singularly enough nobody seemed to care. A little piqued at this, he
began to wonder if he were not thinking too much of this woman to whom
he still hesitated to reveal himself. Nevertheless, he found himself
that night again wandering around the house, and even watching with some
anxiety the shadow which he believed to be hers on the window-blind
of the room where he had by discreet inquiry located her. Whether his
memory was stimulated by his quest he never knew, but presently he was
able to recall step by step and incident by incident his early courtship
of her and the brief days of their married life. He even remembered the
day she accepted him, and even dwelt upon it with a sentimental thrill
that he probably never felt at the time, and it was a distinct feature
of his extraordinary state of mind and its concentration upon this
particular subject that he presently began to look upon HIMSELF as the
abandoned and deserted conjugal partner, and to nurse a feeling of deep
injury at her hands! The fact that he was thinking of her, and she,
probably, contented with her lot, was undisturbed by any memory of him,
seemed to him a logical deduction of his superior affection.

It was, therefore, quite as much in the attitude of a reproachful and
avenging husband as of a merely curious one that, one afternoon, seeing
her issue from her house at an early hour, he slipped down the stairs
and began to follow her at a secure distance. She turned into the
principal thoroughfare, and presently made one of the crowd who were
entering a popular place of amusement where there was an afternoon
performance. So complete was his selfish hallucination, that he smiled
bitterly at this proof of heartless indifference, and even so far
overcame his previous caution as to actually brush by her somewhat
rudely as he entered the building at the same moment. He was conscious
that she lifted her eyes a litt