occupied with other things to lay much
stress upon it, and the sting of Arthur's relapse to worldliness and
folly lay in his own consciousness that it was partly his fault. He
could not chide his brother when he felt that his own heart was absorbed
in his neighbor's wife, and although he had rigidly adhered to his own
crude ideas of self-effacement and loyalty to McGee, he had been again
and again a visitor at his house. It was true that Mrs. McGee had
made this easier by tacitly accepting his conditions of their
acquaintanceship, by seeming more natural, by exhibiting a gayety, and
at times even a certain gentleness and thoughtfulness of conduct that
delighted her husband and astonished her lover. Whether this wonderful
change had really been effected by the latter's gloomy theology and
still more hopeless ethics, he could not say. She certainly showed no
disposition to imitate their formalities, nor seemed to be impressed by
them on the rare occasions when he now offered them. Yet she appeared to
link the two men together--even physically--as on these occasions when,
taking an arm of each, she walked affectionately between them along the
river bank promenade, to the great marveling and admiration of the Bar.
It was said, however, that Mr. Jack Hamlin, a gambler, at that moment
professionally visiting Wayne's Bar, and a great connoisseur of feminine
charms and weaknesses, had glanced at them under his handsome lashes,
and asked a single question, evidently so amusing to the younger members
of the Bar that Madison Wayne knit his brow and Arthur Wayne blushed.
Mr. Hamlin took no heed of the elder brother's frown, but paid some
slight attention to the color of the younger brother, and even more to
a slightly coquettish glance from the pretty Mrs. McGee. Whether or
not--as has been ingeniously alleged by some moralists--the light
and trifling of either sex are prone to recognize each other by some
mysterious instinct, is not a necessary consideration of this chronicle;
enough that the fact is recorded.

And yet Madison Wayne should have been satisfied with his work! His
sacrifice was accepted; his happy issue from a dangerous situation, and
his happy triumph over a more dangerous temptation, was complete and
perfect, and even achieved according to his own gloomy theories of
redemption and regeneration. Yet he was not happy. The human heart is
at times strangely unappeasable. And as he sat that evening in the
gathering shad