had
not been able to find out why. He had attributed it at first to the
shock occasioned by her mother's illness and her departure with Portia
to California, but this explanation seemed not to cover the ground. Why
couldn't she have talked freely with him about that? Inquiries about her
health, attempts--clumsily executed, no doubt--to treat her with special
tenderness and guard her against overexertion, only irritated her, drove
her to the very edge of her self-control--or over it. She was all right,
she always said. He couldn't force confidences from her of course. But
her pale face and eyes wide with a trouble in them he could not fathom
stirred something deeper in him than the former glow and glory had ever
reached.

And there was a new thing that gripped him in a positively terrifying
way--a realization of his importance to her. The after-effect of her
invasion of his office the night of the Randolphs' dinner and of his
learning of the tremulous interest with which she had afterward followed
the case he was then working on, had been very different from his first
irritation and his first amusement.

He had discovered, too, one day--a fortnight or so ago, in the course of
a rummage after some article he had mislaid, a heap of law-books that
weren't his. He had guessed the explanation of them, but had said
nothing to Rose about it--had found it curiously impossible to say
anything. If only she had taken up something of her own! It seemed as
essentially a law of her being to attempt to absorb herself in him, as
it was a law of his to resist that absorption of himself in her.

But resistance was difficult. The tendency was, after his perfectly
solid, recognizable duties had been given their places in the cubic
content of his day, that Rose should fill up the rest. It was as if you
had a bucket half full of irregularly shaped stones and filled it up
with water. And yet there was a man in him who was neither the
hard-working, successful advocate, nor Rose's husband--a man whose
existence Rose didn't seem to suspect. (Was there then in her no woman
that corresponded to him?) That man had to fight now for a chance to
breathe.

He got a pipe out of a drawer in his desk, loaded and lighted it,
stretched his arms, and sat down in his desk chair. In the middle of his
blotter was a stack of papers his stenographer had laid there just
before she went out. On top of the heap was a memorandum in her
handwriting, and mechanical