Without a word he turned his back on her, strode out of the water and up the stony beach. * * * * * If, upon his return home, Mr. Mar was surprised at the warmth of his reception, he was yet more perplexed to find himself never once called upon to state the value of his Polaris mining interests. When he sufficiently recovered from his astonishment at this oversight on Mrs. Mar’s part, he tried once or twice to introduce the subject of his claims into the family circle. But his wife firmly changed the conversation, as one who insists that painful bygones shall be bygones forever. Mar smiled inwardly, for Cheviot’s report had been glowing, and for Cheviot to write like that—well, it was, as the sage said, significant of much. But Cheviot was still “in Alaska, looking after things,” and Mar kept his own counsel. It was plain that these last years had left their mark upon his wife. He laid the change at first to the disintegrating action of time upon even that hard, bright surface. He never knew the secret rage he caused by attributing to the weakness of age what was due to a hard-won self-mastery, a realized and ripened affection. Only little by little did he become aware that the alteration, so far from being a sign of letting-go, was evidence of a fresh taking-hold; a courageous determination not to shrink from making unpleasant discoveries about herself merely because she was of an age when most people cease to make discoveries of any sort. Whatever pains her late-won knowledge cost Mrs. Mar, her family, and especially her old and broken husband, reaped some benefit of that lady’s ability to go on learning at a time of life when the majority think it rather noble if they make so much as an effort to teach. It is probable that, failing Hildegarde, Mar might never have grasped the full meaning of the enlightenment that had come to his life’s partner during these three years of his absence. Upon that first glimpse of him, as he came limping in at the door, his wife had looked at him with a face no one who saw could forget. “It’s been hard for you, too,” she said. “For me, too?” he echoed, wondering. But she had no other word, either then or after—no gift of tender apology, nor even of explanation. Her task, as she conceived it, was not to talk about a long past that was irrevocable, but to “show” the possibility of a brief future that she felt to be still within their reach. For Hildegarde all life had come to a standstill. Weeks must go by before Bella, at her old friend’s urgent summons, could get back from abroad.