suicide had been accepted, Jimmie knew nothing.

Least of all did he know, or even guess, that his act of renunciation,
intended to bring to Jeanne happiness, had nearly brought about her own
end. She believed Jimmie was dead, but not for a moment did she believe
it was for fear of blindness he had killed himself. She and Maddox had
killed him. Between them they had murdered the man who, now that he was
gone, she found she loved devotedly. To a shocked and frightened letter
of condolence from Maddox she wrote one that forever ordered him out of
her life. Then she set about making a saint of Jimmie, and counting the
days when in another world they would meet, and her years of remorse,
penitence, and devotion would cause him to forgive her. In their home
she shut herself off from every one. She made of it a shrine to Jimmie.
She kept his gloves on the hall table; on her writing-desk she placed
flowers before his picture. Preston, the butler, and the other servants
who had been long with them feared for her sanity, but, loving "Mr.
James" as they did, sympathized with her morbidness. So, in the old
farmhouse, it was as though Jimmie still stamped through the halls, or
from his room, as he dressed, whistled merrily. In the kennels the
hounds howled dismally, in the stables at each footstep the ponies
stamped with impatience, on the terrace his house dog, Huang Su, lay
with his eyes fixed upon the road waiting for the return of the master,
and in the gardens a girl in black, wasted and white-faced, walked alone
and rebelled that she was still alive.

After six weeks, when the ship re-entered New York harbor, Jimmie, his
beard having grown, and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, walked boldly
down the gangplank. His confidence was not misplaced. The polo-player,
clean-faced, lean, and fit, had disappeared. Six weeks of German
cooking, a German barber, and the spectacles had produced a graduate of