stimulating happiness he had brought into her lonely life. There was
no one, man or woman, to take his place.

Nor was there any one to criticize. The world was out of town. They
lived in the same hotel, and he rarely met any one in their common
corridor. At first she mentioned his visits casually to her husband,
and Howard grunted approvingly. Several times he took Masters snipe
shooting in the marshes near Ravenswood, but he accepted his friend's
attitude to his wife too much as a matter of course even to mention
it. To him, a far better judge of men than of women, Langdon Masters
was ambition epitomized, and if he wondered why such a man wasted
time in any woman's salon, he concluded it was because, like men of
any calling but his own (who saw far too much of women and their
infernal ailments) he enjoyed a chat now and then with as charming a
woman of the world as Madeleine. If anyone had suggested that Langdon
Masters enjoyed Madeleine's intellect he would have told it about
town as the joke of the season.

Madeleine indulged in no introspection. She had suffered too much in
the past not to quaff eagerly of the goblet when it was full and ask
for nothing more. If she paused to realize how dependent she had
become on the constant society of Langdon Masters and that literature
was now no more than the background of life, she would have shrugged
her shoulders gaily and admitted that she was having a mental
flirtation, and that, at least, was as original as became them both.
They were safe. The code protected them. He was her husband's friend
and they were married. What was, was.

But in truth she never went so far as to admit that Masters and the
books she loved were not one and inseparable. She could not imagine