"No, you can't," returned Milly's voice; hers, but with an accent of coldness and decision in it which struck strangely on his ear. He paused, bewildered. Then he remembered how often he had read that women were capricious, unaccountable creatures. Milly had made him forget that. Her attitude towards him had been one of unvarying gentleness and devotion. Vaguely he felt that there was a kind of feminine charm in this sudden burst of coldness, almost indifference. "Is anything the matter, dear?" he asked. "Aren't you well?" "Quite well, thank you," came the curt voice through the door. Then after a minute's hesitation: "What do you want?" Ian smiled to himself as he answered: "My feet are wet. I want to change." He was a delicate man, and if he had a foible which Milly could be said to execrate, it was that of "sitting in wet feet." He expected the door to fly open; but it did nothing of the kind. There was not a trace of anxiety in the grudging voice which replied, after a pause: "I suppose you want dry shoes and stockings. I'll give them to you if you'll wait." He stood bewildered, a little pained, not noticing the noisy opening and shutting of several ill-fitting drawers in the room. Yet Milly always put away his things for him and should have known where to find them. The door opened a chink and the shoes and stockings came flying through on to the passage floor. He had a natural impulse to use his masculine strength, to push the door open before she could lock it again, but fortunately he restrained it. He went down-stairs slowly, shoes and stockings in hand; threw them down behind the big green stove in the smoking-room and lighted a meditative pipe. It was evidently a fact that women were difficult to understand; even Milly was. He had been uniformly kind and tender to her, and so far she had seemed more than content with him as a husband. But beneath this apparent happiness of hers had some instinct, incomprehensible to him, been whispering to her that he did not love her as many men, perhaps most, loved their young wives? That he had felt for her no ardor, no worship? If so, then the crisis had come at the right moment; at the moment when, by one of those tricks of nature which make us half acquiesce in the belief that our personality is an illusion, that we are but cosmic automata, the power of love had been granted to him again. Yet for all that--very fortunately, seeing that the crisis was more acute than he was aware--he did not fancy that his way lay plain before him. He began to perceive that the cementing of a close union between a man and woman, two beings with so abundant a capacity for misunderstanding each other, is a complex and delicate affair. That to marry is to be a kind of Odysseus advancing into the palace of a Circe, nobler and more humane than the enchantress of old, yet capable also of working strange and terrible transformations. That many go in there carrying in their hands blossoms