between dinner-time and tea-time, while she was giving final
touches to the well-cleaned parlor, she heard her husband's voice just
outside the door. He had come up-stairs very quietly and was speaking
to Mary on the landing.

"Will, Will!" With a cry of delight, Mavis rushed out to welcome him.
"Oh, thank goodness, you've come home." She boldly took his arm, drew
him into the parlor and shut the door again. "Will--aren't you going
to kiss me?"

"No." And he disengaged himself and moved away from her. "No, I can
not kiss you."

"Oh, Will. Do try to forget and forgive." She stood stretching out her
hands toward him imploringly, with eyebrows raised, and lips
quavering.

"I can never forget," he said, after a moment's pause.

Then she tried to make him say that things would eventually come all
right, that if he could not pardon her and take her to his heart now,
he would do so some time or another. He listened to her pleadings
impassively, stolidly; his attitude was stiffly dignified, and it
seemed to her that, whatever his real frame of mind might be, he had
determined to hide it by maintaining an impenetrably solemn tone and
manner.

"Will, you've come home, and I'm grateful for it. But--but I do think
you're cruel to me. Especially considering what's happened, I did
hope you'd begin to think kinder to me."

"Mavis," he said solemnly, "it is the finger of God." And he repeated
the phrase slowly, with a solemnity that was almost pompous. "It is
the finger of God. If that man had not chanced to die in this sudden
and startling way, I could never have come home to you. It was the
decision I had arrived at before I read of his accident in the paper.
Otherwise you'd 'a' never set eyes on me. Now all I can say is, you
and I must trust to the future. It will be my endeavor not to look
back, and I ask you equally to look forward."

She was certain that this was a set speech prepared beforehand. She
knew so well the faintly unnatural note in his voice when he was
reciting sentences that he had learned by rote: she who had helped in
so many rehearsals before his public utterances could not be mistaken.
However, she had to be contented with it. And, stilted and stiff as it
was, it certainly seemed to imply that she need not relinquish hope.

He added something, in the same ponderous style, about the probability
of its being advisable to put private inclinations on one side and
attend the funeral of the deceased in his