absorbed into the night, the storm, become one with its anonymous
force, one with the trees he heard laboring on their trunks. Instead of
the safety of being a part of nature he felt that, without directions,
he had been arbitrarily set down on earth, left to wander blindly with
no knowledge of his destination or its means of accomplishment.

Fragments of a dance measure were audible, and he returned to the
pounding music, the heat, the perceptibly chlorinated perfumes and
determined activity. He went at once in search of his wife; she had
apparently not moved from the chair in which he had left her. Meeting
her slightly frowning, questioning expression he told her simply,
without premeditation or reserve, that he had been out in an
automobile. Fanny was obviously not prepared for his candor, and she
studied him with the question held on her lifted face. Then banishing
that she proceeded to scold him:

"You know how I hate you to do such things, and it seems precisely as
though my wish were nothing. It isn't because I am afraid of how you'll
act, Lee; but I will not let you make a fool of yourself. And that,
exactly, is what happens. I don't want women like Anette to have
anything on you, or to think you'll come whenever they call you. I
can't make out what it is in your character that's so--so weak. There
simply isn't any other name for it. I don't doubt you, Lee," she
repeated, in a different, fuller voice, "I know you love me; and I am
just as certain you have never lied to me. I'm sure you haven't, in
spite of what the girls say about men."

He was cut by an unbearably sharp, a knife-like, regret that he had
ever, with Fanny, departed from the utmost truth. Lee Randon had a
sudden vision, born of that feeling returning from the shed, of the