My room was ready, my personal belongings, my clothes had been laid out,
my photographs were on the dressing-table. I took up, mechanically, the
evening newspaper, but I could not read it; I thought of Maude, of the
children, memories flowed in upon me,--a flood not to be dammed....
Presently the club valet knocked at my door. He had a dinner card.

"Will you be dining here, sir?" he inquired.

I went downstairs. Fred Grierson was the only man in the dining-room.

"Hello, Hugh," he said, "come and sit down. I hear your wife's gone
abroad."

"Yes," I answered, "she thought she'd try it instead of the South Shore
this summer."

Perhaps I imagined that he looked at me queerly. I had made a great deal
of money out of my association with Grierson, I had valued very highly
being an important member of the group to which he belonged; but
to-night, as I watched him eating and drinking greedily, I hated him even
as I hated myself. And after dinner, when he started talking with a
ridicule that was a thinly disguised bitterness about the Citizens Union
and their preparations for a campaign I left him and went to bed.

Before a week had passed my painful emotions had largely subsided, and
with my accustomed resiliency I had regained the feeling of self-respect
so essential to my happiness. I was free. My only anxiety was for Nancy,
who had gone to New York the day after my last talk with her; and it was
only by telephoning to her house that I discovered when she was expected
to return.... I found her sitting beside one of the open French windows
of her salon, gazing across at the wooded hills beyond the Ashuela. She
was serious, a little pale; more exquisite, more desirable than ever; but
her manner implied the pressure of control, and her voice was not quite
steady as she greeted me.

"You've been away a long time," I said.

"The dressmakers," she answered. Her colour rose a little. "I thought
they'd never get through."

"But why didn't you drop me a line, let me know when you were coming?" I
asked, taking a chair beside her, and laying my hand on hers. She drew it
gently away.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"I've been thinking it all over--what we're doing. It doesn't seem right,
it seems terribly wrong."

"But I thought we'd gone over all that," I replied, as patiently as I
could. "You're putting it on an old-fashioned, moral basis."

"But there must be same basis," she urged. "There are responsibilities,
ob