in his memory; the doctors' signs on the sills, the caretakers seeking
the air, the chauffeurs at the cab rank. For hours they watched the
passing and repassing of the young man, who with bent head and fixed
eyes struck at the pavement with his stick.

That he should really kill himself Jimmie did not for a moment
contemplate. To him self-destruction appeared only as an offense against
nature. On his primitive, out-of-door, fox-hunting mind the ethics of
suicide lay as uneasily as absinthe on the stomach of a baby. But, he
argued, by _pretending_ he were dead, he could set Jeanne free, could
save her from gossip, and could still dream of her, love her, and occupy
with her, if not the same continent, the same world.

He had three problems to solve, and as he considered them he devotedly
wished he might consult with a brain more clever than his own. But an
accomplice was out of the question. Were he to succeed, everybody must
be fooled; no one could share his secret. It was "a lone game, played
alone, and without my partner."

The three problems were: first, in order to protect his wife, to
provide for the suicide a motive other than the attentions of Maddox;
second, to make the suicide look like a real suicide; third, without
later creating suspicion, to draw enough money from the bank to keep
himself alive after he was dead. For his suicide Jeanne must not hold
herself to blame; she must not believe her conduct forced his end; above
every one else, she must be persuaded that in bringing about his death
she was completely innocent. What reasons then were accepted for
suicide?

As to this, Jimmie, refusing to consider the act justified for any