felt as though he should go utterly mad. The letter that he wrote to
Cornelia that night was like a letter written in a man's own
heart-blood. His hand trembled so that he could scarcely hold the pen.

Cornelia did not like the letter. She said so frankly. The letter did
not seem to her quite "nice." "Certainly," she attested, "it was not
exactly the sort of letter that one would like to show one's mother."
Then, in a palpably conscientious effort to be kind as well as just,
she began to prattle inkily again about the pleasant, warm, sunny
weather. Her only comment on saving the drowning man was the mere
phrase that she was very glad that she had learned to be a good
swimmer. Never indeed since her absence had she spoken of missing
Stanton. Not even now, after what was inevitably a heart-racking
adventure, did she yield her lover one single iota of the information
which he had a lover's right to claim. Had she been frightened, for
instance--way down in the bottom of that serene heart of hers had she
been frightened? In the ensuing desperate struggle for life had she
struggled just one little tiny bit harder because Stanton was in that
life? Now, in the dreadful, unstrung reaction of the adventure, did
her whole nature waken and yearn and cry out for that one heart in all
the world that belonged to her? Plainly, by her silence in the matter,
she did not intend to share anything as intimate even as her fear of
death with the man whom she claimed to love.

It was just this last touch of deliberate, selfish aloofness that
startled Stanton's thoughts with the one persistent, brutally nagging
question: After all, was a woman's undeniably glorious ability to save
a drowning man the supreme, requisite of a happy marriage?

Day by day, night by night, hour by hour, minute by minute, the