his strength and was ashamed that he had left her so cruelly. He
hurried to the Twenty-third Street elevated station and boarded a
car for his home.

When his wife recovered from the first horror of his leaving, she
was angry. With a nervous laugh she went into the nursery, kissed
the sleeping chil-dren and went to bed. She tossed the first hour,
thinking of the quarrel and many sharp thrusts she might have
given him. Perhaps she would renew the attack when he came in and
attempted to make up. The clock struck eleven and she sprang up,
walked to her window and looked out.

A great new fear began to brood over her soul.

"No, no, he could not have meant it--he is not a brute!" she cried,
as she began to nervously clasp her hands and turn her wedding ring
over and over again on her tapering finger, until it seemed a band
of fire to her fevered nerves.

As she stood by the window in her scarlet silk robe she made a sharp
contrast in person to the woman whose shadow had fallen to-night
across her life. She was a petite brunette of distant Spanish
ancestry, a Spottswood from old Tidewater Virginia. To the tenderest
motherhood she combined a passionate temper with intense jealousy.
The anxious face was crowned with raven hair. Her eyes were dark
and stormy, and so large that in their shining surface the shadows
of the long lashes could be seen.

Her nature, for all its fiery passions, was refined, shy and
tremulous. A dimple in her chin and a small sensitive mouth gave