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But before he returned she stubbornly refused to believe herself.

* * * * *

In the autumn they were again in Paris, in soberer quarters, which were conducive to effort. Edwards was working fitfully with several teachers, goaded on, as he must confess to himself, by a pitiless wife. Not much was discussed between them, but he knew that the price of the statu quo was continued labor.

She was watching him; he felt it and resented it, but he would not understand. All the idealism, the worship of the first sweet months in marriage, had gone. Of course that incense had been foolish, but it was sweet. Instead, he felt these suspicious, intolerant eyes following his soul in and out on its feeble errands. He comforted himself with the trite consolation that he was suffering from the natural readjustment in a woman’s mind. It was too drastic for that, however.

He was in the habit of leaving her in the evenings of the opera. The light was too much for her eyes, and she was often tired. One wet April night, when he returned late, he found her up, sitting by the window that overlooked the steaming boulevard. Somehow his soul was rebellious, and when she asked him about the opera he did not take the pains to lie.

“Oh, I haven’t been there,” he muttered, “I am beastly tired of it all. Let’s get out of it; to St. Petersburg or Norway–for the summer,” he added, guiltily.

Now that the understanding impended she trembled, for hitherto she had never actually known. In suspicion there was hope. So she almost entreated.

“We go to Vienna next winter anyway, and I thought we had decided on Switzerland for the summer.”

“You decided! But what’s the use of keeping up the mill night and day? There’s plenty of opportunity over there for an educated gentleman with money, if what you are after is a ‘sphere’ for me.”

“You want to–to go back now?”

“No, I want to be let alone.”

“Don’t you care to pay for all you have had? Haven’t you any sense of justice to Uncle Oliphant, to your opportunities?”

“Oliphant!” Edwards laughed, disagreeably. “Wouldn’t he be pleased to have an operetta, a Gilbert and Sullivan affair, dedicated to him! No. I have tried to humor your idea of making myself famous. But what’s the use of being wretched?” The topic seemed fruitless. Mrs. Edwards looked over to the slight, careless figure. He was sitting dejectedly on a large fauteuil, smoking. He seemed fagged and spiritless. She almost pitied him and gave in, but suddenly she rose and crossed the room.

“We’ve made ourselves pretty unhappy,” she said, apologetically, resting her hand on the lapel of his coat. “I guess it’s mostly my fault, Will. I have wanted so much that you should do something fine with Uncle Oliphant’s money, with yourself. But we can make it up in other ways.”

“What are you so full of that idea for?” Edwards asked, curiously. “Why can’t you be happy, even as happy as you were in Harlem?” His voice was hypocritical.

“Don’t you know?” she flashed back. “You do know, I believe. Tell me, did you look over those papers on the davenport that night Uncle James fainted?”

The unexpected rush of her mind bewildered him. A calm lie would have set matters to rights, but he was not master of it.

“So you were willing–you knew?”

“It wasn’t my affair,” he muttered, weakly, but she had left him.

He wandered about alone for a few days until the suspense became intolerable. When he turned up one afternoon in their apartments he found preparations on foot for their departure.

“We’re going away?” he asked.

“Yes, to New York.”

“Not so fast,” he interrupted, bitterly. “We might as well face the matter openly. What’s the use of going back there?”

“We can’t live here, and besides I shall be wanted there.”

“You can’t do anything now. Talk sensibly about it. I will not go back.”

She looked at him coldly, critically. “I cabled Slocum yesterday, and we must live somehow.”

“You–” but she laid her hand on his arm. “It makes no difference now, you know, and it can’t be changed. I’ve done everything.”

CHICAGO, August, 1895.