Since that day, the previous spring, on which he had set out to visit a relative, many things had happened, yet but few that were of importance to him. On his return from the trip, during one fleeting second, for the first time since he had known Justine, it seemed to him that she avoided his eyes. To this, in other circumstances, he would have given no thought whatever; as matters were, it made him feel that his excursion should not be regarded as time ill-spent. Whether it had been wholly serviceable to his project, he could not at the time decide. He waited, however, very patiently, but he seldom waited within the apartment walls. At that period he developed a curious facility for renewing relations with former friends. Once he took a run to Chicago with an Englishman he had known in Japan; and once, with the brother of a lady who had married into the Baxter branch of the house of Mistrial, he went on a fishing trip to Canada. These people he did not bring to call on his wife. He seemed to act as though solitude were grateful to her. Save Mrs. Metuchen, Thorold at that time was her only visitor, and the visits of that gentleman Mistrial encouraged in every way that he could devise. Through meetings that, parenthetically, were more frequent on the stair or in the hallway than anywhere else, the two men, through sheer force of circumstances, dropped into an exchange of salutations--remarks about the weather, reciprocal inquiries on the subject of each other's health, which, wholly formal on Thorold's part, were from Mistrial always civil and aptly put. After all, was he not the host? and was it not for him to show particular courtesy to anyone whom his wife received? To her, meanwhile, his attitude was little short of perfection itself. He was considerate, foresighted, and unobtrusive--a course of conduct which frightened her a little. Two or three months after he had struck her in the face she made--_a propos_ of nothing at all--an announcement which brought a trace of color to her cheeks. The following afternoon he happened to be entering the house as Dr. Thorold was leaving it. Instead of greeting him in the nice and amiable fashion which he had adopted, and which Thorold had ended by accepting as a matter of course, he halted and looked at the physician through half-closed eyes. Thorold nodded, cavalierly enough it is true, and was about to pass on; but this Mistrial prevented. He planted himself squarely in his way, and stuck his hands in his pockets. "Mrs. Mistrial has no further need of you," he said. "Send your bill to me." He spoke from the tips of his lips, with the air and manner of one dismissing a lackey. At the moment nothing pertinent could have occurred to Thorold. He stared at Mistrial, dumbly perplexed, and plucked at his cuff. Mistrial nodded as who should say, "Put that in your pipe;" and before Thorold recovered his self-possession he had passed up the stairs and on and out of sight.