nting thought. Yes, it was pointing him
the only way out,--the path to the distant ocean and utter forgetfulness
again!

The chill of his saturated clothing brought him to himself once more,
he turned and hurried home. He went tiredly to his bedroom, and while
changing his garments there came a knock at the door. It was the
porter to say that a lady had called, and was waiting for him in the
sitting-room. She had not given her name.

The closed door prevented the servant from seeing the extraordinary
effect produced by this simple announcement upon the tenant. For
one instant James Smith remained spellbound in his chair. It was
characteristic of his weak nature and singular prepossession that
he passed in an instant from the extreme of doubt to the extreme of
certainty and conviction. It was his wife! She had recognized him in
that moment of encounter at the entertainment; had found his address,
and had followed him here! He dressed himself with feverish haste, not,
however, without a certain care of his appearance and some selection of
apparel, and quickly forecast the forthcoming interview in his mind.
For the pendulum had swung back; Mr. James Smith was once more the
self-satisfied, self-complacent, and discreetly cautious husband that he
had been at the beginning of his quest, perhaps with a certain sense
of grievance superadded. He should require the fullest explanations and
guarantees before committing himself,--indeed, her present call might be
an advance that it would be necessary for him to check. He even pictured
her pleading at his feet; a very little stronger effort of his Alnaschar
imagination would have made him reject her like the fatuous Persian
glass peddler.

He opened the door of the sitting-room deliberately, and walked in with
a certain formal precision. But the figure of a woman arose from the
sofa, and with a slight outcry, half playful, half hysterical, threw
herself upon his breast with the single exclamation, "Jim!" He started
back from the double shock. For the woman was NOT his wife! A woman
extravagantly dressed, still young, but bearing, even through her
artificially heightened color, a face worn with excitement, excess, and
premature age. Yet a face that as he disengaged himself from her arms
grew upon him with a terrible recognition, a face that he had once
thought pretty, inexperienced, and innocent,--the face of the widow of
his former partner, Cutler, the woman he was to have marrie