ship. Never, for a marriage in literary
circles--so the newspapers described the alliance--had a bride been so
handsomely dowered. I began with due promptness to look for the fruit of
their union--that fruit, I mean, of which the premonitory symptoms would
be peculiarly visible in the husband. Taking for granted the splendour
of the lady's nuptial gift, I expected to see him make a show
commensurate with his increase of means. I knew what his means had
been--his article on "The Right of Way" had distinctly given one the
figure. As he was now exactly in the position in which still more
exactly I was not I watched from month to month, in the likely
periodicals, for the heavy message poor Corvick had been unable to
deliver and the responsibility of which would have fallen on his
successor. The widow and wife would have broken by the rekindled hearth
the silence that only a widow and wife might break, and Deane would be
as aflame with the knowledge as Cor-vick in his own hour, as Gwendolen
in hers had been. Well, he was aflame doubtless, but the fire was
apparently not to become a public blaze. I scanned the periodicals in
vain: Drayton Deane filled them with exuberant pages, but he withheld
the page I most feverishly sought. He wrote on a thousand subjects, but
never on the subject of Vereker. His special line was to tell truths
that other people either "funked," as he said, or overlooked, but he
never told the only truth that seemed to me in these days to signify.
I met the couple in those literary circles referred to in the papers: I
have sufficiently intimated that it was only in such circles we were all
constructed to revolve. Gwendolen was more than ever committed to them
by the publication of her third novel, and I myself definitely classed
by holding the opinion that this work was inferior to its immediate
predecessor. Was it worse because she had been keeping worse company? If
her secret was, as she had told me, her life--a fact discernible in her
increasing bloom, an air of conscious privilege that, cleverly corrected
by pretty charities, gave distinction to her appearance--it had yet
not a direct influence on her work. That only made--everything only
made--one yearn the more for it, rounded it off with a mystery finer and
subtler.

XI

It was therefore from her husband I could never remove my eyes: I
hovered about him in a manner that might have made him uneasy. I went
even so far as to engage him in conv