He dreaded above all things the charge of vulgarity, distrusting his first wife's taste, not being quite sure of his own. A compactly built, well-featured man of middle size and pale complexion; a man careful and correct in speech, manner and dress; in his gently reserved, modest bearing giving no sign that he had raised himself far above his origin, that his wealth was new. "Do what you like here," he said to his wife, as if reading her thoughts. "Alter the disposition of the furniture--do away with it altogether. I am by no means wedded to things as they are." He crossed as he spoke to a rosewood cabinet placed against the opposite wall. On its polished surface, above its innumerable little shelves and drawers, a Crown Derby tea and coffee service was set forth. Standing in the midst, propped between a basin and a cup, was the unframed photograph of a woman. This the man removed. Holding it loosely between his finger and thumb, still talking to his wife, he returned with it to his old position on the hearth. "I have not set foot in this room since--for a year," he said. "I thought I would leave everything till you came. Do just as you like." "You are so good to me----" she began, and then started forward in her chair. "Oh, don't, don't, love!" she cried. "Don't burn her picture!" She was too late. For one instant the face of the first wife looked up at her, smiling, fat, fatuous, from the heart of the glowing coals, then, with a stab of the poker, wielded by a remorseless hand, vanished in the blaze. "Oh, love!" she sighed, reproachfully, "Oh, love!" "Why not?" he asked, with a smile which went no further than his close-set lips. He put down the poker on the hearth and rose up again. "She must have laid in a stock of hundreds of those photographs," he said. "The servants appear to have an inexhaustible supply. In spite of--discouragement--they kept my dressing-room and study-table garnished with them till I ordered them to desist." The new wife looked away from him into the fire in a minute's silence. "It seems cruel," at last she said, with an obvious effort. "I wish you had not burnt it, love. At least, not to-night. In this big house there should be room for me and--her photographs." When she found that their bedroom was to be the same which he and his former wife had occupied, she was uncomfortably surprised. The servant who showed her to that apartment in time for her to change her dress for dinner was the middle-aged woman, calling herself parlour-maid, but who had acted as lady's-maid, factotum, confidante to the dead wife. She had made confidantes of all who would listen, poor woman, pouring out the secrets of her heart, and, as far as she knew them, of her husband's heart, into any stranger's ears. "Can I be of any assistance to you, madam?" the maid had inquired; and madam, in order not to give offence, accepted for a time her services.