Detached tears rolled over her cheeks. “I won't cry,” she contradicted the visible act; “I won't. You take such a cowardly advantage of me.” The advantage, he reflected, was entirely on her side. Within, he was hard, he had no feeling of sympathy for her; the division between them was absolute. With an angry movement she brushed the tears from her cheeks. “I hate her,” she said viciously; “she is a rotten detestable woman.” “On the contrary,” he replied, “Mrs. Grove, if you happen to mean her, is singularly attractive. There is no smallness about her.” “Hell,” she mocked him, “it is really too touching. When shall you see her again?” “Never.” At once he saw that he had made a second mistake. “How sad--never; I can't bear it. You both must have been wretched at that long hopeless parting. And she agreed to let you go--back to your wife and children.” Fanny's voice was a triumph of contempt. “I ought to thank her; or be magnanimous and send you back.” “This is all built on a ridiculous assumption,” Lee reminded her; “I even forget how we started. Suppose we talk about something else; Mrs. Grove, as a topic, is pretty well exhausted.” Fanny, narrow-eyed, relapsed into an intent silence. She faded from his mind, her place taken by Savina. Immediately he was conscious of a quickening of his blood, the disturbed throb of his heart; the memory of delirious hours enveloped him in a feverish mist more real than his wife sitting before him with a drawn brow. * * * * * Usually after such scenes Fanny had flowered in a tender remorse for their bitter remarks, the wasted opportunity of happiness; but again she left him coldly, unmelted. He was glad--a show of affection would have been unsupportable. But his marriage was becoming precarious; Lee seemed to be without power to execute his firm intentions; a conviction of insecurity settled over him. The sense of a familiar difficulty returned; there was nothing for him to do but order his life on a common pattern and face an unrelieved futility of years. He remembered, with a grim amusement, the excellent advice he had given Peyton Morris, Peyton at the verge of falling from the approved heights into the unpredictable. If he had come to him now in that quandary, what would he, Lee, have said? Yet all that he had told Peyton he still believed--the variety of life lay on the circular moving horizon, there was none at hand. But now he comprehended the unmeasurable longing that had, for the time, banished every other consideration from the younger man. It had upset his heredity, his violent prejudices, and his not negligible religion.