The pale eyes opposite that watched saw he suffered, and bitterness grew evenly with the wonder that filled her heart. She was a tenacious woman, one who would even hold fast a thing which she no longer valued, simply because it belonged to her. She was clever and shrewd, and she was making some astonishingly correct deductions from Thrall's looks and manner as well as his words. Hitherto his amours had been lightly formed and lightly broken, and she had been conscious at times of a sort of contemptuous pity for the women whose reign she knew would be so brief--but this was different. She had known last night--she told herself, she had seen, she had heard the new tenderness in his glance and tone. She saw in Sybil a new type of rival, a creature of intelligence as well as of beauty; and then and there had lighted even the dull anger that was burning in her now. She looked at his goodly length of limb, at his well-shaped, closely cropped head, at the black sweep of lashes she knew he hated. A sudden quiver came about her pale lips as she recalled how, in their early married days, she had often called his attention to something on the floor just for the pleasure of seeing their silky length sweep downward. He had never known, or he would probably have repeated the deed of his boyhood, when in a rage he had cut them off close to the lids and had been shut up under the doctor's care in consequence. And now he wanted her to give him up. "Why?" She had not known that she had spoken the word until his start told her. Then he said, slowly: "You would be happier, I think, Lettice" (he smiled faintly). "You would not be distressed, then, by my bad conduct, you know." "Your consideration for my feelings is as touching as it is novel, but it is not a convincing reason for the putting away of a wife." "A wife?" repeated Thrall, as he raised his eyes and looked steadily, meaningly, at her. "I think the precise and unemotional dictionary itself will describe wife as a 'woman united to a man by marriage.' Are we united, Lettice? It is nearly three years since our tenderly emotional public parting at the steamer, but our real parting dates much farther back." She interrupted, to say, sharply: "Well, no one knows of that, and I'm sure my presence in London was of great service to you. At least two important plays would have escaped you, but for me and my clever planning." "Yes," he answered, a little weariedly. "But I was not speaking of our relations as manager and agent--they are quite satisfactory; but I was about to state that while I am not an unmarried man--I am wifeless." "Ah!" she ejaculated; "that never troubled you before!" He paid no heed, but went on, steadily: "The law cannot put us one inch farther asunder than we are now, but it can free us from this hypocrisy and pretence, and restore us our dignity and independence and freedom."