“Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar.” Boyne had tossed the clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an arm-chair near the fire. “Do you want to hear the story? It’s not particularly interesting--just a squabble over interests in the Blue Star.” “But who is this Elwell? I don’t know the name.” “Oh, he’s a fellow I put into it--gave him a hand up. I told you all about him at the time.” “I daresay. I must have forgotten.” Vainly she strained back among her memories. “But if you helped him, why does he make this return?” “Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him over. It’s all rather technical and complicated. I thought that kind of thing bored you.” His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated the American wife’s detachment from her husband’s professional interests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention on Boyne’s report of the transactions in which his varied interests involved him. Besides, she had felt from the first that, in a community where the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of efforts as arduous as her husband’s professional labors, such brief leisure as they could command should be used as an escape from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the life they always dreamed of living. Once or twice, now that this new life had actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself if she had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no more than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy. Now, for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was built. She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the composure of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite grounds for her reassurance. “But doesn’t this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me about it?” He answered both questions at once: “I didn’t speak of it at first because it DID worry me--annoyed me, rather. But it’s all ancient history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number of the ‘Sentinel.’” She felt a quick thrill of relief. “You mean it’s over? He’s lost his case?” There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne’s reply. “The suit’s been withdrawn--that’s all.” But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge of being too easily put off. “Withdrawn because he saw he had no chance?” “Oh, he had no chance,” Boyne answered. She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her thoughts. “How long ago was it withdrawn?” He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty. “I’ve just had the news now; but I’ve been expecting it.” “Just now--in one of your letters?” “Yes; in one of my letters.”