d forget her
golden dream and turn back again to the old life. For three months she
would have been a wife. She would forget that time. She would own to
Jasper that she had made a mistake. She would be Hilda Merton once more.
Alas! alas! that could not be. Vows and ceremonies tied her. She had
stood beside the altar and given herself away. There was no going back
on that step. Jasper was not the Jasper of her dreams. He must have a
small mind not to understand Judy, and she had married him because she
thought his mind so big and his heart so great. After all, Judy was far
greater than Jasper.

"My little Judy," she murmured again, and then she sank down a pitiable,
weak, inconsolable figure on the hearth-rug close to the expiring fire.
She thought over the scenes of the last night and longed to have them
back again.

"If Judy's arms were round me, I should not feel so lonely," she
murmured. "Oh, Jasper, how can you turn from me? How can you fail to
understand that my heart at least is big enough to love both Judy and
you?"

The lamp burnt dimly and the fire went completely out. Hilda presently
fell asleep in the darkness, and now a moonbeam shining into the drawing
room and falling across her tired face made it look white and unearthly,
almost like the face of a dead girl. It was in this attitude that
Quentyns found her when he came back somewhere between one and two
o'clock.

His conscience was reproaching him, for Rivers, an old friend, had not
failed to give him a little spice of his mind; but he was just in that
irritable condition where repentance is almost impossible, and when
self-abasement only leads a man into further wrong-doing.

When he saw Hilda's tired face, he said to himself with a sort of laugh:

"If I don't encourage this sort of thing, I shall doubtless be more and
more of a tyrant in the eyes of my good wife and that precious
fastidious child and Rivers. Well, well, I cannot see the beauty of
voluntary martyrdom. If Hilda weren't quite such a goose, she would have
gone to bed two hours ago, instead of falling asleep here to the utter
disregard of her health and personal appearance."

So Quentyns, looking cross and uninterested, shook his wife not too
gently; spoke in a commonplace tone, out of which he purposely excluded
every scrap of emotion, and asked her how much longer she wanted to sit
up.

Hilda stumbled to her feet without a word. She went upstairs and to bed,
but although her husb