He had not confessed to himself before why he had been so willing, and more than willing, that his wife should make a visit of three months at her old home. It had been her wish to go, and he had magnanimously granted her permission. Thus he told himself. But he knew he concealed, under a pretense of self-denial, the secret joy he felt that her own voluntary act should lend aid to the furtherance of his half-formed designs. He had not told the better part of himself what these designs were. It is doubtful whether at this time he had faced the fact that they were designs at all. They were mere desires. At least they were vague, shadowy, evanescent creations, taking form from his desires, and developing slowly in the secret, dark chambers of his bosom. He felt now, rather than thought consciously, that the barrier which had restrained the current of his impulses was washed away and he might sink in the lethal waters or be drifted away from prudence and engulfed in the maelstrom of pleasure. He could not say _vice_, but a guilty consciousness oppressed him now as he stood upon the platform watching the last curling waves of smoke float backward. Wylie boasted of being a man of progressive ideas, a modern philosopher, who had outgrown the old-fogyism of the past generation and arisen to a plane where he could sit and lay down laws unto himself—mark out a plan of life for this world and the hereafter. He was well-read in modern sciences and a student of mental philosophy. He confessed himself infidel in that he denied the Divine origin of the Scriptures, laughed at what he called the pretty fables that bound the conscience of the orthodox Christian, and felt himself superior in his latter-day wisdom. He claimed to be a free-thinker and a liberalist, who read Huxley and venerated Ingersoll, but had adopted a modern creed more in accordance with modern requirements. He confessed to a decided leaning toward spiritism. In fact, if his ideas were really expressed, he believed a man had a right to do about as he pleased in this world, despite moral and civil law. Not that he would have confessed as much to himself. That was another of his self-delusions. But he had outgrown in theory, with the fables taught him in his youth, his boyish code of morality. He had also outgrown, so he believed, his love for his wife, whom he had married many years ago, when he was but twenty-one, a mere boy, incapable of judging or choosing wisely. So he argued with the better self. Not that he found serious fault with her. He secretly wished he might do so, but she had been faithful to him, he believed, and upheld the family honor; was pretty, stylish, domestic, social, and a kind mother to his son. All this he was forced to acknowledge. But she was one ideaed, commonplace, he told himself, and she was not his _spiritual affinity_. Ah, there was a reason furnished by his lately adopted creed. She was not his affinity.