With all this, it was plain that we got on best when we were most alone. It was not that I did not every way like and was interested in the friends he introduced to me, outdoor men most of them, and their large-minded, capable wives. I got on with them tremendously, and found them as good for me as green food in the spring, sated as I was on the combined product of professionalism and temperament. It was chiefly that the simplicity and openness of their lives brought out for him the duplicity that lay at the bottom of ours. For it was plain that they wouldn't have understood, wouldn't have thought it necessary. They could have faced, those women, strange lands and untoward happenings, had many of them faced sterner things for the sake of their husbands, with the same courage and selflessness with which they would in my circumstances, have faced renunciation. It was the realization of this, so much sharper in him who had seen and known, that checked and harassed Helmeth; he wished to be at one with them, to be felicitated on my success and my charm, to include me if only by implication, in that community of adventure with which these mining and engineering folk had ringed the earth. And the necessity of holding our relation down to the outward forms of friendship established on the supposition of our having grown up together, fretted him. "It isn't honest," he broke out once after he had tried to persuade me to let him tell his friends that we were engaged. "It's all right between us; you are my wife in the sight of whatever gods there are, but that isn't what other people would call you." "Somehow, Helmeth, so long as it is with you, I don't care much what they call me." "Well, I care; I care a lot. You don't seem to remember you are going to be my girls' mother--sons' too, I hope. We ought to have some more children; Sanderson's got four." Sanderson had been our host at luncheon that day. Helmeth was knocking out the ashes of his pipe on my hearthstone; he paused in the occupation of refilling it to look down at me in a moody kind of impatience that was the worst I knew of him. There was the suggestion of a cleft in his strong, square chin which came out whenever he bit hard on a difficult proposition. The play of it now was like the tiny shadow of disaster. "I was down in old Brownlow's office the other day," he went on, "talking this Mexican scheme to him, and he had to break off in the middle of it to telephone to some chorus girl he had a date with. God! it made me hot to think of it!" "Because I'm in the same----" He cut me off with a sound of vexation. "Don't say it; don't even think of it! How long does this contract of yours last?" "To the end of the season," I told him.