cheerfulness, would have taken her in his arms. But she turned away, her
hand involuntarily put up as a barrier between herself and the kiss that
at the moment she shrank from. He took the hand instead and pressed it
to his lips.

When he had gone, she bathed quickly, partially dressed herself, and
called her maid to do her hair. Sitting before the improvised
dressing-table, she glanced in the mirror, and her reflection caught and
held her attention a long moment. A curious, half-wistful, half-pathetic
expression crept into her eyes as the realization came to her sharply
that she was fading. There were lines and shadows and pallor that ought
not to be in the face of a woman of thirty-five. She smoothed the
vertical lines in her forehead, and then let her hands remain over her
face, while behind their cool smoothness her mind resumed its
troublesome thoughts.

It was not like meeting some new difficulty for which the strength is
fresh; it was struggling again with emotions that have repeatedly
exhausted one's endurance. Just as she had every hope that her husband
was cured of the gambler's fever, here he was down again with an even
more dangerous form of it. The man who knowingly risks is bad enough;
but the man who cannot see that he risks, and cannot understand how he
has lost is the hardest victim to cure. All of her capital was gone
except a small property which her brother-in-law, J. B. Randolph, held
for her in trust and on the income of which they now lived. Ten years
before she had had considerable money, enough for them to live not only
in comfort but in luxury. A large amount had been sunk in a Sicilian
sulphur mine, and to this investment she had given her consent, not yet
realizing her husband's lack of judgment. But aside from this, cards and
horse races and trips to Monaco had limited their living in luxury to a