"'Margaret Aubyn's Letters.' Two volumes. Out to-day. First
edition of five thousand sold out before leaving the press.
Second edition ready next week. THE BOOK OF THE YEAR. . . ."

He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown
back, her pure profile detached against the cushions. She was
smiling a little over the prospect his last words had opened.
Behind her head shivers of sun and shade ran across the striped
awning. A row of maples and a privet hedge hid their neighbor's
gables, giving them undivided possession of their leafy half-acre;
and life, a moment before, had been like their plot of ground,
shut off, hedged in from importunities, impenetrably his and hers.
Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf, every privet-bud, was
a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their privacy. It
was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a
darkness full of hostile watchers. . . . His wife still smiled;
and her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to
put her beyond the reach of rescue. . . .

He had not known that it would be like this. After the first
odious weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in
submitting them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers,
the transaction had dropped out of his consciousness into that
unvisited limbo to which we relegate the deeds we would rather not
have done but have no notion of undoing. From the moment he had
obtained Miss Trent's promise not to sail with her aunt he had
tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed. After that, he
argued, his first duty was to her--she had become his conscience.
The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel's adroit
manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow's successful