When I try now to recall the next month, I can bring back merely a turmoil of legal wrangles. I contrived in the midst of it all to spend two Sundays with Mildred, but I remember nothing of them except the blessed wave of rest that swept over me as I lay on the grass under the elms. On my second visit I saw that she was looking badly, though when I commented on her pallor and the darkened circles under her eyes, she laughed and put my anxious questions aside. “Oh, I’ve lost sleep, that’s all,” she answered, vaguely, with a swift glance at the house. “Did you ever think how many sounds there are in the country that keep one awake?” As the day went on I noticed, too, that she had grown restless, and once or twice while I was going over my case with her—I always talked over my cases with Mildred because it helped to clarify my opinions—she returned with irritation to some obscure legal point I had passed over. The flutter of her movements—so unlike my calm Mildred—disturbed me more than I confessed to her, and I made up my mind before night that I would consult Drayton when I went back to Washington. Though she had always been sensitive and impressionable, I had never seen her until that second Sunday in a condition of feverish excitability. In the morning she was so much better that by the time I reached Washington I forgot my determination to call on her physician. My work was heavy that week—the case was developing into a a direct attack upon the management of the road—and in seeking evidence to rebut the charges of illegal rebates to the American Steel Company, I stumbled by accident upon a mass of damaging records. It was a clear case of somebody having blundered—or the records would not have been left for me to discover—and with disturbed thoughts I went down for my third visit to Dare’s Gift. It was in my mind to draw out of the case, if an honourable way could be found, and I could barely wait until dinner was over before I unburdened my conscience to Mildred. “The question has come to one of personal honesty.” I remember that I was emphatic. “I’ve nosed out something real enough this time. There is material for a dozen investigations in Dowling’s transactions alone.” The exposure of the Atlantic & Eastern Railroad is public property by this time, and I needn’t resurrect the dry bones of that deplorable scandal. I lost the case, as everyone knows; but all that concerns me in it to-day is the talk I had with Mildred on the darkening terrace at Dare’s Gift. It was a reckless talk, when one comes to think of it. I said, I know, a great deal that I ought to have kept to myself; but, after all, she is my wife; I had learned in ten years that I could trust her discretion, and there was more than a river between us and the Atlantic & Eastern Railroad.