that his weapon had broken in his hands. He saw now that his rage
against Flamel was only the last projection of a passionate self-
disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man;
it simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel's unwillingness to
quarrel with him was the last stage of his abasement.

In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his
wife's indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the
sentimental resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a
factitious world wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his
vanity, and it was with instinctive relief that he felt its ruins
crash about his head.

It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly
homeward in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a
crisis. He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet
when he reached his own door he found that, in the involuntary
readjustment of his vision, she had once more become the central
point of consciousness.



XIII


It had never before occurred to him that she might, after all,
have missed the purport of the document he had put in her way.
What if, in her hurried inspection of the papers, she had passed
it over as related to the private business of some client? What,
for instance, was to prevent her concluding that Glennard was the