During all this time he had never even let her know--no, not once--of the tremendous and soul-crushing sacrifice he had made. Like the Spartan boy, he had concealed the fox gnawing at his vitals. He had not complained. He had been, indeed, the model husband, as such things go in conventional walks. If you doubted it look at his position, or that of his children; or his wife--her mental and physical comfort, even in her illness, her unfailing belief that he was all he should be! Never once apparently, during all these years, had she doubted his love or felt him to be unduly unhappy--or, if not that exactly, if not fully accepting his love as something that was still at a fever heat, the thing it once was--still believing that he found pleasure and happiness in being with her, a part of the home which together they had built up, these children they had reared, comfort in knowing that it would endure to the end! To the end! During all these years she had gone on molding his and her lives--as much as that was possible in his case--and those of their children, to suit herself; and thinking all the time that she was doing what he wanted or at least what was best for him and them. How she adored convention! What did she not think she knew in regard to how things ought to be--mainly what her old home surroundings had taught her, the American idea of this, that and the other. Her theories in regard to friends, education of the children, and so on, had in the main prevailed, even when he did not quite agree with her; her desires for certain types of pleasure and amusement, of companionship, and so on, were conventional types always and had also prevailed. There had been little quarrels, of course, always had been--what happy home is free of them?--but still he had always given in, or nearly always, and had acted as though he were satisfied in so doing. But why, therefore, should he complain now, or she ever imagine, or ever have imagined, that he was unhappy? She did not, had not. Like all their relatives and friends of the region from which they sprang, and here also--and she had been most careful to regulate that, courting whom she pleased and ignoring all others--she still believed most firmly, more so than ever, that she knew what was best for him, what he really thought and wanted. It made him smile most wearily at times. For in her eyes--in regard to him, at least, not always so with others, he had found--marriage was a sacrament, sacrosanct, never to be dissolved. One life, one love. Once a man had accepted the yoke or even asked a girl to marry him it was his duty to abide by it. To break an engagement, to be unfaithful to a wife, even unkind to her--what a crime, in her eyes! Such people ought to be drummed out of the world. They were really not fit to live--dogs, brutes!