A little breeze, shaking the palm-foliage close by, had the sadness of pattering rain, but it brought a wave of spiced carnation and heliotrope and sweet geranium mixed with rose. Ermengarde sighed with the breeze. Her unquiet breast told her that something was wrong within; she could not, perhaps would not, say what; she had fallen a little way from some height, but how she could not tell. Only she was quite sure she ought to have opened the publisher's parcel earlier; she was equally sure that she should have been given some knowledge of the importance of its contents beforehand. In any case, she had been the last to know of an event that altered the whole tenor of her own and her husband's lives. Arthur must have known at least that he had produced something of a higher quality, and greater aim and scope, than he had ever done before; yet he had lived under the same roof with her and never said a word; he had been like a man in a dream, absorbed, preoccupied, moving in a world apart, of which she had never been given the faintest glimpse. Perhaps her darkest suspicions were justified. And now, in the full blaze of a sudden fame, he had made no sign and given her no shadow of participation in his changed fortune. No one could make a first great success like that with indifference. He must have been deeply moved, if only by the prospect of a fresh vista of mental activity opening before him, or, less worthily, by the comparative wealth it assured. Yes; those huge sales of which she heard must mean a solid accretion of hard cash for the writer of the book, were publishers never so rapacious. And his short, scrappy letters gave no hint of what must be an epoch, a turning-point, in his life. They were without address, because of that mysteriously prolonged business tour; they were evidently written some time before they reached her, while her answers, addressed to the home he appeared never to have seen since they parted, had presumably made long tours before he received them. Where was Arthur? An inquiry addressed to Herbert on the subject had met with an unsatisfactory reply. Her father and mother only mentioned her husband in answer to her questions; they had not seen him; he had not yet returned; he was a notoriously bad letter-writer, conducting his correspondence mainly by telegraph or telegrammatic post-cards, she heard. Things undoubtedly were more serious, the breach between them more deadly, than she had suspected. A very bad feature of the case was his refusal to finance the tour of which she had stood in such real need on the plea of poverty. Poverty! When he must have known that he was on the brink of a gold-mine.