For you are married, you and she: and you live, contentedly enough, in a four-square world, where there is the rent and your social obligations and the children’s underclothing to be considered, long and long before indulgence in rattle-pate mountain-climbing. And people glibly think of you as Mr. and Mrs. Grundy now, almost as a unit: but do you really know very much about that woman whose gentle breathing—for we will not crudely call it snoring—you can always hear at will o’ nights? Suppose, by a wild flight of fancy, that she is no more honest with you than you are with her? * * * * * So to Kennaston his wife remained a not unfriendly mystery. They had been as demi-gods for a little while; and the dream had faded, to leave it matters not what memories; and they were only Mr. and Mrs. Felix Kennaston. Concerning all of us, my fellow failures in the great and hopeless adventure of matrimony, this apologue is narrated. Yet, as I look into my own wife’s face—no more the loveliest, but still the dearest of all earthly faces, I protest—and as I wonder how much she really knows about me or the universe at large, and have not the least notion—why, I elect to believe that, in the ultimate, Kennaston was not dissatisfied. For all of us the dream-haze merges into the glare of common day; the _dea certé_, whom that fled roseate light transfigured, stands confessed a simple loving woman, a creature of like flesh and limitations as our own: but who are we to mate with goddesses? It is enough that much in us which is not merely human has for once found exercise—has had its high-pitched outing, however fleet—and that, because of many abiding memories, we know, assuredly, the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying through dining-rooms and offices and shops and parlors, and thronged streets and restaurants, “and so to bed.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ V Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain WITH the preceding preachment I wish I might end the story. For what follows—which is my own little part in the story of Felix Kennaston—is that discomfortable sort of anticlimax wherein the key to a mystery, by unlocking unsuspected doors, discloses only another equally perplexing riddle. Kathleen Kennaston died in her sleep some eleven months after her husband discovered the missing half of the sigil.... “I have a sort of headache,” she said, toward nine o’clock in the evening. “I believe I will go to bed, Felix.” So she kissed him goodnight, in just that emotionless preoccupied fashion that years of living together had made familiar; and so she left him in the music-room, to smoke and read magazines. He never saw her living any more.