A Bachelor Husband

MARIE sat lost in thought for a long time after the others had gone on. It was very peaceful out there on the links, and to-day there was hardly anybody about.

"I sat with Love upon a woodside well. Leaning across the water, I and he; Nor ever did he speak, or look at me, But touched his lute wherein was audible, The certain secret thi...

Marie said, "Oh, had he?" and lost interest. As yet money had not much significance for her, but she watched the closed library door with anxious eyes. Would it never open?

"Yes! I mean no! Oh, it's nothing much, at any rate, but--but I told Chris you were going to take me to a concert to-night, that you had got two tickets . . ." She broke off agi...

IT was impossible to be ungracious. Marie took Dorothy Webber into the drawing-room while Chris sent the car away. He stood looking after it with a frown above his eyes. It was...

MARIE woke in the morning with a bad headache. She would have liked to stay in bed, but not for the world would she have allowed Mrs. Heriot the satisfaction of her absence.

This was the end of her honeymoon! Nearly a month since she had been married--a month of bitterness and disappointments, with only one bright memory attaching to it--her friends...

"I love him, and I love him, and I love! Oh heart, my love goes welling o'er the brim; He makes my light more than the sun above. And what am I! save what I am to him?"

He was terribly nervous, which partially accounted for the lightness of the words, but Marie read no meaning into them, except the old dreaded indifference, and she turned her f...

THE game stopped abruptly, and between them Chris and Feathers carried Marie from the room. "It was the smoke, and the heat!" Atkins kept saying in distress. He felt angry with...

"I was a sailor, sailing on sweet seas, Trading in singing birds and humming bees. But now I sail no more before the breeze. You were a pirate met me on the sea; You spoke, with...

He packed his things long before they would be needed, and unpacked them again because he wanted to use them; he took stacks of clothes and golf sticks and a brand-new fishing-r...

HE woke with a racking headache and nerves like wire that is stretched to snapping point. He made a pretense of breakfast, not daring to ask after Marie. He was afraid to go out...

"Well, how goes it?" he asked. He sat down on the other side of the table, so that his face was out of the light. The room to him seemed filled with Marie's presence. It was so...

"And justice stood at the proud man's side, 'Whose is the fault? Accuse!' it cried; And the proud man answered in humbled tone, 'I cannot accuse--the fault is mine own.'"

Perhaps young Atkins knew this, for, at any rate there was a look of determination about him as he walked into the drawing-room, where Marie was pretending to read and trying to...

"The hour which might have been, yet might not be. Which man's and woman's heart conceived and bore. Yet whereof life was barren, on what shore Bides it the breaking of Time's w...

His conscience had begun to prick him a little. He had noticed the pallor of Marie's face at breakfast time, and the something strained in her determined cheeriness, and, good f...

AT THE end of the week Dr. Carey ceased his visits, "You won't need me any more," he assured Marie. "Take care of yourself, that is all, and no more bathing this season."

Chris did his best. He really thought he was playing the part of a model husband; he loaded her with sweets which she could not eat and presents which she did not want. He was i...

She watched them drive away, and then sat down to write to Chris. She marked the letter "Private," and underlined the word twice to draw attention to it. She wrote:

CHRIS had gone out that morning without seeing either Miss Chester or his wife. His first passionate bitterness and anger against Feathers had passed, leaving him more wretched...

SHE had always adored him. From the first moment he came to the house--an overgrown, good-looking schoolboy, and had started to bully and domineer over her, Marie Chester had th...

THEY took Marie back to the Yellow Sheaf Inn, on the Oxford road, carrying her on a rough stretcher made of a broken gate, covered with coats, and Chris walked beside her, holdi...

"But ah! the little things for which I sigh, As each day passes by, The open book, the flower upon the floor. The dainty disarray. The sound of passing feet. Alas, the little th...

"I am old and very tired, though to strangers I am young; Life was just a sporting gamble, but for me the game is done; It was worth it, and I'm scoffing now the reckoning has c...

"Oh heart that neither beats nor heaves, In that one darkness lying still. What now for thee my love's great will? Or the fine web the sunshine weaves?" C. D. Rossetti

"And I remember that I sat me down Upon the slope with her, and thought the world Must be all over, or had never been, We seemed there so alone."