Durgan had turned to the door the moment she had asked him to go. He was tarrying on the threshold to ask his last question, to hear her response. When he heard himself, with no unkind intent, naturally linked with the wretched mulatto, his pace was accelerated. With a word of farewell he disappeared into the dusk, hearing the horses arrive at the stables as he went his fugitive way down the familiar trail. Chapter XXV LOST IN THE MAZE Durgan had still one strong emotion regarding his wife; he was able to feel overwhelming shame on her account, and he dreaded any publicity concerning her behavior. She had always lived so as to command the consent of good society to her doings. He had perfectly trusted her social instinct to do this as long as it lay in her power to tell her own story; but he knew, with a sense of bitter degradation, that if someone else had need to tell that story, it would sound very different. His wife was the daughter of an uneducated hotel-keeper, and had married him, as he afterward discovered, because he had the entrance into certain drawing-rooms and clubs, which, if skilfully used, might have proved the stepping-stone to almost any social eminence. At the time of her marriage she had professed passionate love for him and sympathy for the Southern cause; and her fortune, not small, was naturally to be used in the difficult task of making part of his paternal acres productive by the paid labor of the negroes reared and trained by his father, and justly dear to the son. Disconsolate at the loss of friends and fortune--for all near to him had died in the war, of wounds or sorrow--Durgan repaid the love and sympathy of one who seemed a warm-hearted and impulsive woman with tender gratitude. A little later, when the wife found out that Durgan would not push himself into the fashionable _milieu_ which was open to him in Europe and America, he began to discover, tho slowly, that she would not bestow affection or time upon any less fashionable pursuit. She needed her whole fortune for the social adventures that she must make alone; and as he would not open the door of Southern pride for her, she fell to knocking at the door of Northern pride for herself. No doubt Providence has a good reason for making men before marriage blind to female character, but it was many years before Durgan bowed to the fate to which defect, not fault, had brought him. Too proud to accept any bounty from such a wife, he had sullenly shielded her from remark till she reached a position of middle-class fashion in which she could stand alone. Having attempted, in the meantime, to increase by speculation the small patrimony left him, and losing much, he had retired from the scene of her struggles some six years before the present time, proudly thankful that any public reproach was directed only at himself. Since then she had scaled social heights seemingly beyond her--he had often wondered how.