He strode off toward the Fort, the deep sand somewhat derogatory to dignity of carriage, but favoring the increase of irritability. Agnes strolled slowly along the beach until she found a lonely rock upon the tip of a tongue of bleached sand, where she could sit and think out the bitterest hour she had ever known. People, passing upon pier and esplanade, saw her there all the forenoon, a slight figure whose gray gown matched in color the stones among which she sat, as motionless as they. The brackish tide rose slowly until the spray sprinkled her feet, whispering mournful things to rock and sand. She saw and heard nothing, while her eyes seemed to follow the stately sail and swoop of the gulls whose breasts showed whitely against the blue of the December sky. Other wives than Lorraine Loree have wedded men of high degree only to find that “husbands can be cruel,” and more than Lorraine or Agnes dreamed of have made the discovery before the wane of the honeymoon. This bride felt bruised and beaten all over, and suffered the more, not less, for her sorrowful bewilderment as to the exact cause of this, the first quarrel. CHAPTER II. SOME women and many men are compounded and shaped into sentient beings without the infusion of so much as a pennyweight of tact. Many women and a few men combine with this deficiency—which is, in itself, a deformity—a fatal facility for saying exactly the wrong thing when the wrong thing will do most harm. Miss Marvel had taken all the honors in this line which native bias and feminine fussiness could win, and she wove a new spray into her laurel wreath one day in the March succeeding the winter in which Barton Ashe and Agnes Welles were made one—in law and gospel. The morrow would be his wife’s birthday, and Barton had in his breast pocket a tiny box containing a sapphire ring for her, when he arose to resign his seat in the street car to the dashing spinster, whom he recognized as soon as she entered. He had never seen her since his wedding eve, but she was not a woman to be forgotten or overlooked. She was in great force to-day, gorgeously appareled and flushed beyond high-rouge mark by three hours at a literary breakfast, given at Delmonico’s to a distinguished foreigner. “I am surcharged with electric thought,” she confided to Mr. Ashe when she had taken the vacated place with a cavalier nod that might mean “Thanks,” or “That’s only decent, my good man.” “Ah!” said Barton, in naïve wonderment, for the want of anything else to say. “Surcharged! bristling! I could fancy that at the approach of the negative pole I should crackle and emit sparkles like a brisk battery. Such a feast of intellect! such flow of soul! such scintillating wit! Three hours of such intercourse were worth ten—a thousand cycles of Cathay. Our guest was superb! such dignity and such graciousness of affability as can only coexist in an Old World product.”