"I haven't succeeded in seeing Jeff yet," he began, with a slight hesitation. It seemed to him it might be easier for her to hear that name than the formal words, "your husband". She winced. Choate saw it and pitied her, as she knew he would. "Is he coming--here?" She looked at him with large, imploring eyes. "Must I?" he heard her whispering, it seemed really to herself. "I don't see how you can help it, dear," he answered. The last word surprised him mightily. He had never called her "dear". She hadn't even been "Esther" to him. But the warmth of his compassion and an irritation that had been working in him with Jeff's return--something like jealousy, it might even be--drove the little word out of doors and bade it lodge with her and so betray him. Esther heard the word quite clearly and knew what volumes of commentary it carried; but Choate, relieved, thought it had passed her by. She was still beseeching him, even caressing him, with the liquid eyes. "You see," she said, "he and I are strangers--almost. He's been away so long." "You haven't seen him," said Choate, like an accusation. He had often had to bruise that snake. He hoped she'd step on it for good. "No," said Esther. "He didn't wish it." Choate's sane sense told him that no man could fail to wish it. If Jeff had forbidden her to come at the intervals when he could see his kin, she should have battered down his denials and gone to him. She should have left on his face the warm touch of hers and the cleansing of her tears. Choate had a tremendous idea of the obligations of what he called love. He hid what he thought of it in the fastnesses of a shy heart, but he took delight and found strength, too, in the certainty that there is unconquerable love, and that it laughs at even the locksmiths that fasten prison doors. He knew what a pang it would have been to him if he had seen Esther Blake going year after year to carry her hoarded sweetness to another man. But he wished she had done it. Some hardy, righteous fibre in him would have been appeased. "He's happier away from me," said Esther, shaking her head. "His father understands him. I don't. Why, before he went away we weren't so very happy. Didn't you know that?" Choate was glad and sorry. "Weren't you?" he responded. "Poor child!" "No. We'd begun to be strangers, in a way. And it's gone on and on, and of course we're really strangers now." The Esther she meant to be gave her a sharp little prick here--that Esther seemed to carry a needle for the purpose of these occasional pricks, though she used it less and less as time went on--and said to her, "Strangers before he went away? Oh, no! I'd like to think that. It makes the web we're spinning stronger. But I can't. No. That isn't true."