She pressed his arm tightly. “I shall go to sleep so happy.” So he promised and the girl’s face brightened. Soon afterwards they parted. Minna drove homewards in a cab, kissing her hand to him as it moved off, and Hugh walked along towards Lancaster Gate, deep in troubled thought. It was an ill-starred marriage, already he regretted his folly and his weakness. If they had shared the same home, living a common life, he felt that he could have maintained a constantly tender attitude towards her, by means of a passive acceptance of his lot. But in the present circumstances, the nature of things demanded of him active demonstration. The necessary intriguing was repugnant to him. To visit his wife like a thief in the night was an act from which he shrank as from something mean and degrading. A passionate love would have swept away pettier feelings. It is only such a love that laughs at locksmiths; a waning passion be-bestows on them irritable curses. The prospect of entering The Lindens, late at night, by a window which Minna secretly unlatched, and creeping thief-wise up the stairs to her apartments, had lost its edge of romance. He had promised, however, and it became a disagreeable duty. It damped his spirits for the evening. Even Irene could not cheer him. Conversation degenerated into futile bar gossip between Gerard and himself, which they protracted sleepily till a late hour. When at last he found himself with Minna, who had taken infinite pains to make her beauty as attractive as possible, she reopened, with feminine inconsistency, the chapter of the Merriams and sent him away, after a little, angry and disheartened. His unqualified refusal to allow his regard for her to affect his relations with his friends gradually magnified itself, through the girl’s jealousy, into a great wrong. Once at the turn of a road she met him with them face to face. The after-glow of laughter was in Irene’s eyes. Minna acknowledged their salute with sullen stiffness, and when Hugh fell back a pace and turned to her with outstretched hand, she dismissed him angrily. Her face wore the hardened expression he had seen on it once before. Then he had attributed it to strength. But now it seemed to reveal only sulky ill-breeding. A phrase defining her flashed through his mind. She looked common. “What a peculiarly disagreeable young woman,” said Gerard, as he rejoined his friends. Hugh winced. Although not ill pleased to see that Gerard had no suspicions of the relations between himself and Minna, the outspoken judgment on his wife was anything but gratifying. He struggled, however, to atone by gentleness for his grievous fault in marrying her. But it was a futile task to try to convince a jealous, untrained girl, who reasoned from her appetites and argued from her passions. At last he gave it up with a helpless gesture of impatience. “It seems beyond your nature to comprehend the bond between the Merriams and myself,” he said, one day.