"Oh, don't say that," begged Toni, her warm heart filled with pity for him. "I like your wife immensely--we are friends, you know, and you must not forget she has suffered terribly." "Yes, I suppose she has. And yet"--he spoke vehemently--"has she suffered so much as I have done--as I shall go on doing as long as we both live? Oh, I've no right to say it--I ought to be man enough to suffer in silence--but it's hard to bear her constant allusions to her prison life--her taunts--wouldn't you think she would be glad to forget all that, to put it behind her? Yet every day she talks of it. She never allows me to forget for one instant that she has been in hell--and every word she utters is an indictment of me, a reproach for the cowardice which let her go to prison." "Oh, Mr. Herrick--I'm so sorry...." The stammered words brought a smile to Herrick's face. "Poor child! I ought not to blame her--rather to pity her.... I _do_ pity her with all my heart. But she won't let me sympathize with her. One word and she flies at me. She is unhappy here, yet she will make no plans for going abroad. She talks as though I kept her here, when God knows I would go to the ends of the earth if she wished it." "Yes, I know, but I think if you go on being patient with her," hazarded Toni, "she will come to her better self again. Don't you agree with me?" "I don't know." His tone was rather despairing. "Sometimes I fear both our lives are ruined. It's wonderful what an effect a wife has on her husband's life--and _vice versa_, of course. Some people seem to think that a man and woman can 'live their own lives' quite apart from each other if they like. But they can't. When they are husband and wife they are bound to exercise an enormous influence on each other's life; and when two people are thoroughly out of sympathy with each other, life, for both of them, is bound to be a failure." "You think so?" Toni's mind had flown to her own unhappiness, but for once Herrick did not read what was in her thoughts. "Yes. Don't you? Now, looking at it dispassionately, how do you expect Eva and me ever to re-discover the happiness we have so effectually lost? Remember, Eva is convinced that all her sufferings are directly due to me. She persists in thinking that if I had chosen I could either have prevented her case ever going to court, or could have taken the blame myself and gone to prison in her stead. The consequence is, she hates me, resents my presence near her, and will bear me an undying grudge all the days of her life." "But you couldn't have taken the blame." "Of course not, but women are often illogical, and Eva certainly is. No, the fact remains that I represent, to Eva, the coward who condemned her to a severe and mortifying punishment; and she won't forgive me." "But in time----"