"No, no, no. I did not mean that. It is not my wish that you destroy yourself. You must not. _You must not_! I need you—above everything I _need you_. If you die I am undone! Where is our marriage certificate? Or was there one? And who was that witness? Do not die, do not die. As you love me _do not die_!" She carefully arranged every detail of her toilet, pinched her pale cheeks into something of pink, put on her morning smile, and, with a very conscious effort at lightness of manner, tripped out into the hall and down the stairs. She knew the very spot on which she would see her husband standing. With a round-about journey she approached it. He was not there. She laughed nervously, and with an aimless air, but a faster thumping heart, sought him at another haunt. Failure. And failure again. She went to breakfast, and displayed a lack of appetite and a tendency to hysterics. After breakfast she lingered down-stairs on every conceivable pretext, and journeyed from one end of the house to the other many times and again. At last when her nerves could not stand the strain a second longer she asked the coachman, who had driven the carriage to the door, where Hayward was. She felt that there was a full confession in the tones of her voice. "Hayward asked for a day off this mornin’, mum. He didn’t come. Just telephoned." Helen felt the tension of her nerves snap. She hurried to her room, suppressing fairly by force an impulse to scream, and locking the door, threw herself across the bed. There for three hours, pleading a headache and denying admittance to all who knocked, she cowered before the thoughts of her seething brain—and suffered torment. Along about two o’clock she sprang up suddenly and turned out of her trunk all of her husband’s letters and began feverishly to search for one she remembered written long ago which by chance contained the street number of his lodgings. She was nearly an hour finding it. Again she went through the womanly process of making herself presentable, and sauntered freshly forth in quest of the post office and a special delivery stamp. With an added prayer that he relieve her suspense quickly, she dropped her agonized note into the box under the hurry postage. Having thus done all that was possible to save her husband’s life—and her own—she went back to her bed in collapse, and waited for the night-fall as one, hoping for a reprieve, who must die at sunset. *CHAPTER XXXI* Helen waited in vain for a word from her husband. Her letter did not come to his hand. She tossed in agonized suspense through the long hours—through the snail-paced minutes—through the dragging, tortured moments.