. I go sometimes myself just to see what is going on, you know, and if it is the sort of thing you would like, so as to know what to take you to when you come. And I accept all the nice invitations for you, conditionally, of course. I say if you are in town at the time, and I hope you may be (which is true enough always), you will be happy to go, or words to that effect. So you see there is plenty for you to do at any time in the way of amusement. I am always making arrangements, it is like getting ready to welcome you. When I am answering invitations or doing the theatres I feel quite as if I expected you. It is childish, perhaps, but it makes something to look forward to, and when I am busy preparing for you, somehow the days do not seem so blank."

Angelica felt something rise in her throat, but she neither spoke nor moved.

"Or we might go to Paris," he proceeded tentatively. "Shall we? I could pair with someone till the end of the session. We might go anywhere, in fact, and I should enjoy a holiday if—if you would accompany me." He looked at her with a smile, but the intermittent telick, telick, telick of his nervous drumming on the table told that he was far from feeling all the confidence he assumed. For in truth Angelica's attitude alarmed him more and more. On other occasions, when he had tried to be more than usually kind and indulgent, she had always called him a nice old thing or made some such affable if somewhat patronizing acknowledgment, even when she was out of temper; but now, finding that he was waiting for an answer, she just looked up at him once, then fixed her eyes on the ground again, and spoke at last in a voice so hopeless and toneless that he would not have recognized it.

"I think I have only just this moment learnt to appreciate you," she said. "I used to accept all your kind attentions as merely my due, but I know now how little I deserve them, and I wish I could be different. I wish I could repay you. I wish I could undo the past and begin all over again—begin by loving you as a wife should. You are ten thousand times too good for me. Yet I have cared for you in a way," she protested; "not a kind way, perhaps, but still I have relied
