pply you had failed to connect with since that fire.
Tell me, Jim, how Gabrielle could keep you away? How could you allow a
woman to separate you from your old pal? Does it seem reasonable? And
yet you always were so innocently plausible I could never doubt you. How
did that happen? Tell me now, before I give you anything to eat. I
would like to feel a little more sure on that point."

I whistled and rattled on, perfectly charmed to be again under the
influence of that wife-slayer's magic smile or his potent frown--it was
all the same to me.

"I simply don't know," answered Jim. "I can't tell you. I don't know,
Ben. I am easily led by Gabrielle. I was weak. Had I insisted upon
seeing you from the first, no matter what happened--but there, let it
pass. I asked your help with her father. There I made a bad mistake. You
did something--I don't know what it was exactly, but you put your foot
'way down in--you upset me from the first. But let it pass. I'll take
all you can give me to eat and then we'll go at the thing again; not
where we left off the night we parted at the flat, but where we stand
now. Gabrielle, too, has forsaken me, Ben." He looked at me with his
mouth drawn down, his pinched face betraying surrender, his heavy eyes
burdened with care.

"Forsaken you! How so? Was she not with you at the hospital?"

"Those letters to the Brown girl, in Thirty-eighth Street, are at the
bottom of it, Ben. I told you they would come back, if you wrote so
much. Those letters have ruined me--ruined me with the one woman I have
loved. The other women--those to whom you wrote, you induced me to fool.
Don't you see you did, Ben? Those letters you signed my name to, and
gushed your poetry into like a stream from a fire-hose, swept me off;
all the women you wrote to thought they were crazy letters, Ben. I never
dared tell you that; but they all put me down for a fool, and as I had
no particular interest in them I took the blame, Ben. I never supposed
the letters could reach Gabrielle. I had them all in my bureau drawer
when the fire started. I forgot to burn them--just chucked them in there
when I got them back from Miss Brown. There must have been over a
hundred. And, blowed if you didn't work in a lot of my hair! Egad, you
must have clipped it when I fell asleep listening to you read them. I
have heard them read since, too, at the hospital. Our nurse read one
very prettily, and then I thought my hour had come--"

"Our nurse rea