"He says he was very harsh," Helen continued, "though I fancy he could not be quite that in any circumstances. It was very hard," she added with a sigh. "It was like looking at a dead child to see my best work ruined. It was really a part of myself." "But can't it be repaired? It was in the clay, wasn't it?" "Yes, but I fear for my exhausted enthusiasm. I can never do it as it was before. My poor, unlucky December." She toyed with her glass absently, apparently for the moment forgetting her companion, who continued his supper with no less relish than before. He watched her keenly, however, fully aware that there was more to be told. He was a man too accustomed to follow any desire or indulge any whim not to notice appreciatively, as he had noticed many times before, how beautiful were the curves of his wife's arms and throat, and with what grace her head was poised. He had once defined a liberal man as one who could appreciate his own wife, and he would have been far more insensible than he was, if, with this beautiful woman before him he had not been, judged by his own standard, extremely liberal. "And this has what to do with the question of our relations being known?" he asked. She started from her reverie, the red again showing faintly in her cheek. "It is hardly fair," she answered in a tone softer and lower than that in which she had been speaking, "to tell you all that Mr. Herman said. He wishes to marry me." "And you wish you were free to have it so?" There was once more a pause. Helen busied herself in an elaborate arrangement of the torn lettuce leaves upon her plate, seemingly concentrating all her thoughts upon forming them into an intricate figure. "Will," she said, suddenly, lifting her eyes and leaning towards him, "I do not know how to make you understand. I haven't succeeded so well in my attempts thus far in life as to be very sanguine of doing it now. You do not know how ashamed and contemptible I felt for being party to the deception that made it possible for him to speak so to me. He was so honest, so earnest; he was so unconscious of the barriers between us. I felt that I had done him such an irreparable wrong by concealing the truth. He had a right to know that I am a married woman." "Did you tell him?" "No; but I must. I want to be free from the promise we made to each other." "It all comes," returned her husband without any show of irritation, "from my telling Fenton." "I cannot see what that has to do with it. I like the absence from questioning, the avoidance of gossip, as much as you can; but it makes me feel as if I were a living lie to have Mr. Herman bringing his honest love to me to be met only by deception. It is cruel and it is wrong."