blazing in Connie's bedroom, and when he went in to extinguish them,
moved by some instinct of economy, he found that the room was in even
greater disorder than that to which he had grown, after years of
uncomplaining discomfort, outwardly if not inwardly resigned. Of a
naturally systematic habit of thought, Connie's carelessness had been
for him one of those petty annoyances of daily life to meet which he had
always felt that philosophy had been especially designed; but to-night
the chaos struck him so forcibly that he found himself vaguely
questioning if it were possible for a human creature to sleep in such a
spot? Picking up several gowns from the middle of the floor, he returned
them to the wardrobe, and set himself to clearing the bed of an array of
satin shoes. Her silver hair brushes had fallen on the hearth rug, and
in replacing them upon the bureau his eye fell on a small, half-empty
phial lying beneath a pile of lace-edged handkerchiefs. Looking at it a
little closer he found that it contained a solution of cocaine.

For a moment surprise held him motionless; then as if to refute and
explain away any ordinary reason for her possession of the drug, he
remembered, in a comprehensive flash the recent violent changes in her
character--her uncontrollable attacks of nervousness, her spasmodic
movements and her sudden flowing, almost hysterical, volubility of
speech. His heart contracted with a sensation like that of terror, and
he was turning away again when his glance was arrested by a heap of
crumpled bills lying loosely in one corner of the open drawer.
Recollecting that she had complained the day before of the smallness of
her allowance, he drew out the papers for a casual examination--but it
needed much less, in fact, than this to assure him that her expenses had
not only gone immeasurably beyond her own limited allowance, but that
they had considerably exceeded his slightly larger income. Her debts had
evidently run up to a sum which she had lost the courage to confess even