ight and early-in-the-morning business too hard.
Think where we'd be if you turned up missing on the opening night!"

"I shan't do that," she said absently almost, and not in his direction.
Then, with another little shake, bringing herself back to him with a
visible effort: "If you only knew what a wonderful thing it's going to
be, to have something for late at night and early in the morning ..."

Before he could find the first one of the words he wanted, she had given
him that curt farewell nod which, so inexplicably, from the first had
stirred and warmed him, and turned away toward the door.

And she had never seen what was fairly shining in his face; no more than
she had heard the thing that rang so eagerly in his voice through the
thin disguise of an impersonal, director-like concern that she shouldn't
impair her health so far as to spoil her for the sextette!

CHAPTER VII

THE END OF A FIXED IDEA

She couldn't of course have missed a thing as plain as that but for a
complete preoccupation of thought and feeling that would have left her
oblivious to almost anything that could happen to her. Galbraith himself
had detected this preoccupation, but he would have been staggered had he
known its intensity. He had likened it in his own thoughts, to an effect
that might have been caused by the presence with her of another person
whom he could neither see nor hear. And that, had he believed it
seriously, would have been an almost uncannily correct guess.

The flaming vortex of thoughts, hopes, desires which enveloped her, was
so intense as almost to evoke a sense of the physical presence of the
subject of them--of that big, powerful-minded, clean-souled husband of
hers, who loved her so rapturously, and who had driven her away from him
because that rapture was the only thing he would share with her.

She had been living, since that day of his departure for New York, when
she had felt the last of his strong embraces, a life that fell into two
hemispheres as distinct from each other as tropic night from day. One
half of it had been lighted and made tolerable by the exactions of her
new job. "What you feel like doing isn't important, and what I tell you
to do is," John Galbraith had said to her on the day this strange
divided life of hers had begun. And this lesson, taken to heart, had
spelt salvation to her--for half of the time; for as many hours of the
day as he went on telling her to do something. Those hours