“Perhaps, in time, I shall feel different, Douglas.” He smiled bitterly. “I hope that God isn’t as merciless as good women are!” he said. She showed resentment at once. “I am not merciless, but I can’t go back to that place to be pointed at, as I should be--to have my name connected with that man’s--” Her voice broke. “What do you mean?” he asked. “I mean that I have read the article that was published this morning,” she went on, more calmly. “I heard some people at the hotel speak of it while we were waiting to go out into the dining-room. They thought I couldn’t hear them, but I did hear--every word. They laughed, and they said there was a good deal more behind it than the paper said. I knew what that meant. When they went out I looked at the paper on a file. And yet you can ask me to go back to Washington after that?” she said, with reproach and shame in her voice. Briggs grew pale. “I hoped you might not hear of it,” he said. “I’m sorry, Helen.” She hesitated, but she resolutely kept her face turned from him. Then she gathered her wraps again and left the room. For a few moments after she disappeared Douglas Briggs stood motionless. Then he sank into the seat beside the desk. Until now he had believed that a reconciliation with his wife was sure to come in time. Now the situation seemed hopeless. He had lost her. This last humiliation made it impossible for her ever to respect him again. In spite of his resolutions of the past few months, he felt that he deserved his punishment. He had not only blighted his own happiness, he had ruined hers. That was the cruelest pain of all. Now he felt, with a bitterness deeper than he had ever known, that without her love, without her sympathy and companionship, life had nothing that could give him satisfaction. Why should he go on working? Why not give up his ambitions and his aspirations? They had brought him only disappointment and suffering. XXII “Just as I was leaving I met a messenger-boy with these returns. I opened the envelope.” Douglas Briggs started. Farley’s cheerful and businesslike voice had given him a sensation of alarm. “Oh, is that you, Farley?” he said. “All right,” he went on, vaguely. Then he glanced at the yellow paper in Farley’s hand. “What does it say?” “The returns that we received over the wire from the Ninth District were wrong. They got mixed down at the _Gazette_ office.” “How was that?” Briggs’s voice showed that he was still bewildered. “The majority of 235 was not for you.” The full significance of the remark slowly made its way into Douglas Briggs’s mind. “Ah!” He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s a bad sign, isn’t it?” “Very bad. I knew they’d been spending money up there.” Briggs sat back in his chair. He had recovered himself now. “Well, they would have spent more than we could; so, perhaps, it’s just as well that we didn’t spend any.”