successor, chin on waistcoat, a
newspaper across his knees, an empty decanter at one elbow. Something
remained in the glass beside the bottle; he had tumbled off before the
end. There were even signs of deliberate preparations for slumber, for
the shade was tilted over the electric light by which he had been
reading, as a hat is tilted over the eyes.

Rachel had a touch of pity at seeing him in a chair for the night; but
the testimony of the decanter forbade remorse. She had filled it herself
in the evening against her husband's return from an absence of
mysterious length. Now she understood that mystery, and her face
darkened as she recalled the inconceivable insult which his explanation
had embraced. No, indeed; not another minute that she could help! And he
would sleep there till all hours of the morning; he had done it before;
the longer the better, this time.

She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by an uncontrollable
revulsion; and there she stood, pale and quivering with a disgust that
only deepened as she looked her last upon the shaded face and the
inanimate frame in the chair. Rachel could not account for the intensity
of her feeling; it bordered upon nausea, and for a time prevented her
from retracing the single step which at length enabled her to shut both
doors as quietly as she had opened them, after switching off the light
from force of habit. There was another light still glowing in the hall,
and, again from habit, Rachel put it out also before setting foot upon
the stairs. A moment later she was standing terror-stricken in the dark.

It was no sound from the study, but the tiniest of metallic rattles from
the flap of the letter-box in the front door. The wind might have done
it, for the flap had lost its spring; and, though the noise was not
repeated, to the wind Rachel put it down, as she mounted the stairs at
last in a flutter that caused her both shame and apprehension. Her nerve
was going, and she needed it so! It should not go; it should not; and as
if to steady it, she opened the landing window, and spent some minutes
gazing out into the cool and starry night. Not that she could see very
far. The backs of houses hid half the stars in front and on either hand,
making, with the back of this house and its fellows, a kind of square
turned inside out. Miserable little gardens glimmered through an
irregular network of grimy walls, with here and there a fair tree in
autumnal tatters; but Rache