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Late in December the Leicesters called; they were like gleeful sparrows, twittering about. Mrs. Edwards shuddered to see them again, and when they were gone she gave up and became ill.

Her tense mind relieved itself in hysterics, which frightened her to further repression. Then one night she heard herself moaning: “Why did I have to take all? It was so little, so very little, I wanted, and I had to take all. Oh, Will, Will, you should have done for yourself! Why did you need this? Why couldn’t you do as other men do? It’s no harder for you than for them.” Then she recollected herself. Edwards was holding her hand and soothing her.

Some weeks later, when she was very ill, she remembered those words, and wondered if he had suspected anything. Her child came and died, and she forgot this matter, with others. She lay nerveless for a long time, without thought; Edwards and the doctor feared melancholia. So she was taken to Italy for the cold months. Edwards cared for her tenderly, but his caressing presence was irritating, instead of soothing, to her. She was hungry for a justification that she could not bring about.

At last it wore on into late spring. She began to force herself back into the old activities, in order to leave no excuse for further dawdling. Her attitude became terribly judicial and suspicious.

An absorbing idleness had settled down over Edwards, partly excused to himself by his wife’s long illness. When he noticed that his desultory days made her restless, he took to loafing about galleries or making little excursions, generally in company with some forlorn artist he had picked up. He had nothing, after all, so very definite that demanded his time; he had not yet made up his mind for any attempts. And something in the domestic atmosphere unsettled him. His wife held herself aloof, with alien sympathies, he felt.

So they drifted on to discontent and unhappiness until she could bear it no longer without expression.

“Aren’t we to return to Paris soon?” she remarked one morning as they idled over a late breakfast. “I am strong now, and I should like to settle down.”

Edwards took the cue, idly welcoming any change.

“Why, yes, in the fall. It’s too near the summer now, and there’s no hurry.”

“Yes, there is hurry,” his wife replied, hastily. “We have lost almost eight months.”

“Out of a lifetime,” Edwards put in, indulgently.

She paused, bewildered by the insinuation of his remark. But her mood was too incendiary to avoid taking offence. “Do you mean that that would be a life, loafing around all day, enjoying this, that, and the other fine pleasure? That wasn’t what we planned.”

“No, but I don’t see why people who are not driven should drive themselves. I want to get the taste of Harlem out of my mouth.” He was a bit sullen. A year ago her strict inquiry into his life would have been absurd. Perhaps the money, her money, gave her the right.

“If people don’t drive themselves,” she went on, passionately, “they ought to be driven. It’s cowardly to take advantage of having money to do nothing. You wanted the–the opportunity to do something. Now you have it.”

Edwards twisted his wicker chair into uncomfortable places. “Well, are you sorry you happen to have given me the chance?” He looked at her coldly, so that a suspicious thought shot into her mind.

“Yes,” she faltered, “if it means throwing it away, I am sorry.”

She dared no more. Her mind was so close on the great sore in her gentle soul. He lit a cigarette, and sauntered down the hotel garden. But the look he had given her–a queer glance of disagreeable intelligence– illumined her dormant thoughts.

What if he had known all along? She remembered his meaning words that hot night when they talked over Oliphant’s illness for the first time. And why had he been so yielding, so utterly passive, during the sordid drama over the dying man? What kept him from alluding to the matter in any way? Yes, he must have encouraged her to go on. She had been his tool, and he the passive spectator. The blind certainty of a woman made the thing assured, settled. She picked up the faint yellow rose he had laid by her plate, and tore it slowly into fine bits. On the whole, he was worse than she.