hysterical. Even when he had kissed her she had been conscious of that long straight nose. She withered at the thought. She slipped out of the house into the soft night. Pendish, with its double line of low, whitewashed, thatched cottages, one a deep shadow, the other clear in the moonlight, lay as still as a ghostly village of the middle ages. The echo of her light footsteps frightened her. Surely windows would fly open and heads peer out challenging the disturber of peace. She was going to him. Why, she scarcely knew. Perhaps through obedience to Myra. Myra’s bloodless lips, working in the waxen, immobile face lit, if dull glimmer could be called light, by the cold china blue eyes, had uttered words little less than oracular. Myra had been waiting for a sign or a token from her that had never come. She walked through the splendid silence of the country road, beneath the radiance of a moon above the hills illuminating a mystery of upland and vale shrouded in the vaporous garments of the land asleep. Hurrying along the white ribbon of road she was but a little dark dot on the surface of a serenely scornful universe. She was going to him. He was her man. All that she knew of the meaning of existence came from him. Moonlight and starlight and the mystery of the night shimmering through its veil of enchantment faded from her eyes. She felt nervous arms around her and kisses on her lips, and she heard him speaking the winged words of imagination, lifting her into his world of genius. “A man doesn’t try to kill himself for a woman he doesn’t want.” So spake Myra. Olivia walked, the dull tones in which the words were uttered thudding in her ears. It was her one hope of salvation. Kill himself! This was not a falsehood. She had seen the act with her own horror-stricken eyes. She remembered a phrase of Blaise Olifant’s: “He is being blackmailed by one lie.” She realized, with sudden shock, her insignificant loneliness in the midst of this vast moonlit silence of the earth. In presence of the immensities she was of no account. For the first time she became aware of her own failure. She had been weighed in the balance of her love for her husband and had been found wanting. In the hour of his bitter trial, she had failed him. In the hour when a word of love, of understanding, which meant forgiveness, would have saved him, she had put him from her. She had lived on her own little vanities without thought of the man’s torture. She had failed him then. She had failed him to-day. “A man doesn’t try to kill himself for a woman he doesn’t want.” She strode on, her cheeks burning. All that of extravagance which he had done this past year had been for her sake. For all wrong he had done her, he had sought the final expiation in death. She had failed him again in this supreme crisis. She had whined to Myra that he no longer loved her. And she had not given him—that which even Myra was waiting for—a sign and a token.