eyes. Take back your blue envelope; and thank you for thinking of
me. It's always the woman of the house that has the head.'

'I wish,' said Sheila almost pathetically, and yet with a faint
quaver of resignation, 'I wish it could be said that the man of
the house sometimes has the heart. Think it over, Arthur!'

Sheila, with her husband's luncheon tray, brought also her
farewells. Lawford surveyed, not without a faint, shy stirring of
incredulity, the superbly restrained presence. He stood before
her dry-lipped, inarticulate, a schoolboy caught redhanded in the
shabbiest of offences.

'It is your wish then that I go, Arthur?' she said pleadingly.

He handed her her money without a word.

'Very well, Arthur; if you won't take it,' she said. 'I should
scarcely have thought this the occasion for mere pride.'

'The tenth,' she continued, as she squeezed the envelope into her
purse, with only the least hardening of voice, 'although I
daresay you have not troubled to remember it--the tenth will be
the eighteenth anniversary of our wedding-day. It makes parting,
however advisable, and though only for the few days we should
think nothing of in happier circumstances, a little harder to
bear. But there, all will come right. You will see things in a
different light, perhaps. Words may wound, but time will heal.'
But even as she now looked closely into his colourless sunken
face some distant memory seemed to well up irresistibly--the