study. On the table lay the packet he had given her. It was much
smaller--she had evidently gone over the papers with care,
destroying the greater number. He loosened the elastic band and
spread the remaining envelopes on his desk. The publisher's
notice was among them.



X


His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the
case of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene
he thinks to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-
hole framing the same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation
to which his resolve had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning
apathy. His impulse of confession had acted as a drug to self-
reproach. He had tried to shift a portion of his burden to his
wife's shoulders and now that she had tacitly refused to carry it,
he felt the load too heavy to be taken up again.

A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase
of sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won
it, and came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were
thriving enough to engross him in the pauses of his professional
work, and for over two months he had little time to look himself
in the face. Not unnaturally--for he was as yet unskilled in the
subtleties of introspection--he mistook his temporary
insensibility for a gradual revival of moral health.