hurt her."

"But we will wait till to-morrow, Alice," he again repeated.

"Very well," she answered, with the indifference of despair.

He stood in the doorway and watched a horseman descending into valley.

"Strange things may chance before to-morrow," he said to himself, and he
mechanically lighted another cigar. She idled with her fan.




II

He did not leave the house that afternoon. He kept his post on the
veranda, watching the valley. With an iron kind of calmness he was
facing a strange event. It was full of the element of chance, and he had
been taking chances all his life. With the chances of fortune he had
won; with the chances of love and happiness he had lost. He knew that
the horseman on the mountain-side was Cayley; he knew that Cayley would
not be near his home without a purpose. Besides, Cayley had said he
would come--he had said it in half banter, half threat. Houghton had had
too many experiences backward and forward in the world, to be afflicted
with littleness of mind. He had never looked to get an immense amount of
happiness out of life, but he thought that love and marriage would give
him a possible approach to content. He had chanced it, and he had lost.
At first he had taken it with a dreadful bitterness; now he regarded it
with a quiet, unimpassioned despair. He regarded his wife, himself, and