granted the splendour of the other party's nuptial gift, I expected
to see him make a show commensurate with his increase of means. I
knew what his means had been--his article on "The Right of Way" had
distinctly given one the figure. As he was now exactly in the
position in which still more exactly I was not I watched from month
to month, in the likely periodicals, for the heavy message poor
Corvick had been unable to deliver and the responsibility of which
would have fallen on his successor. The widow and wife would have
broken by the rekindled hearth the silence that only a widow and
wife might break, and Deane would be as aflame with the knowledge
as Corvick in his own hour, as Gwendolen in hers, had been. Well,
he was aflame doubtless, but the fire was apparently not to become
a public blaze. I scanned the periodicals in vain: Drayton Deane
filled them with exuberant pages, but he withheld the page I most
feverishly sought. He wrote on a thousand subjects, but never on
the subject of Vereker. His special line was to tell truths that
other people either "funked," as he said, or overlooked, but he
never told the only truth that seemed to me in these days to
signify. I met the couple in those literary circles referred to in
the papers: I have sufficiently intimated that it was only in such
circles we were all constructed to revolve. Gwendolen was more
than ever committed to them by the publication of her third novel,
and I myself definitely classed by holding the opinion that this
work was inferior to its immediate predecessor. Was it worse
because she had been keeping worse company? If her secret was, as
she had told me, her life--a fact discernible in her increasing
bloom, an air of conscious privilege that, cleverly corrected by
pretty charities, gave distinction to her appearance--it had yet
not a direct influence on her work. That only made one--everything
only made one--yearn the more for it; only rounded it off with a