had suffered, had been driven from him by
coldness, by cruelty? One never knew the real inner histories of such
domestic tragedies. There was Leila, for example, who knew nothing of
Barry's faults, and Barry had not told her. Might not other men have
faults which they dared not tell? The world was full of just such
tragedies.

When at last Mary reached the Tower Rooms, she undressed in the dark.
She said her prayers in the dark, out loud, as had been her childish
habit. And this was what she said: "Oh, Lord, I want to believe in
Roger. Let me believe--don't let me doubt--let me believe."

When at last she slept, it was to dream and wake and to dream again.
And waking or dreaming, out of the shadows came ghostly creatures, who
whispered, "His little wife was a saint--how could she make him
unhappy?" And again, "He may have been cruel, how do you know that he
was not cruel?" And again, "If you were his wife, you would be
thinking always of that other wife--thinking--thinking--thinking."

CHAPTER XX

_In Which Mary Faces the Winter of Her Discontent; and in Which Delilah
Sees Things in a Crystal Ball._

The summer slipped by, monotonously hot, languidly humid. And it was
on these hot and humid days that Mary felt the grind of her new
occupation. She grew to dread her entrance into the square close
office room, with its gaunt desks and its unchanging occupants. She
waxed restless through the hours of confinement, escaping thankfully at
the end of a long day.

She longed for a whiff of the sea, for the deeps of some forest, for
the fields of green which must be somewhere beyond the blue-gray haze
which had settled over the shimmering city.

She began to show the effects of her unaccustomed drudgery. She grew
pale and thin. Aunt Isabelle was worried. The two women sat much by
the fountain. Mary had begged Aunt Isabelle to go away to some cooler
spot. But the gentle lady had refused.

"This is home to me, my dear," she had said, "and I don't mind the
heat. And there's no happiness for me in big hotels."

"There'd be happiness for me anywhere that I could get a breath of
coolness," Mary said, restlessly. "I can hardly wait for the fall
days."

Yet when the cooler days came, there was the dreariness of rain and of
sighing winds. And now it was November, and Roger Poole had been away
a year.

The garden was dead, and Mary was glad. Dead gardens seemed to fit
into her mood better than th