lso
disappearing out of his?"

Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. "I leave her to work out that
problem."

"And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?"

"He's not to know of them."

The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of
inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: "Not at first,
that is. She had thought it all out--foreseen everything; and she wrung
from me--I don't yet know how!--a promise that when I saw him I would
make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible
complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of
connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let
him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing--and I agreed,
on the condition of her effacing herself somehow--of course on some
other pretext."

"Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he
adores her!"

Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "We haven't seen him since
this became known to him. _She_ has; and she let slip that he was
horror-struck."

Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation. "Let slip? Isn't it
much more likely that she forced it on you--emphasized it to the last
limit of credulity?" She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and
exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: "You say she was
frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!"

Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: "No
doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too."

Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I understand your feeling
as you do--I'm deep in the horror of it myself. But I can't help seeing
that this woman might have saved herself--and that she's chosen to save
her husband instead. What I don't see, from what I know of him," she
musingly proceeded, "is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce
him to accept the sacrifice."

Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If that's the only point your
mind dwells on----!"

Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn't dwell anywhere as yet--except, my
poor Henry," she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying
her hand on his bent shoulder--"except on your distress and misery--on
the very part I can't yet talk of, can't question you about...."

He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into
his own tremulous fingers, pressed it silently, with a clinging
helpless grasp that drew the tears t