put in Theron. He made no effort to dissemble the sneer in his voice.

"Well," answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity, "I have told you
now, and it is off my mind. There never would have been the slightest
concealment about it, if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length,
and making it next door to impossible to speak to you at all, and if--"

"And if he hadn't lied." Theron, as he finished her sentence for her,
rose from the table. Dallying for a brief moment by his chair, there
seemed the magnetic premonition in the air of some further and kindlier
word. Then he turned and walked sedately into the next room, and closed
the door behind him. The talk was finished; and Alice, left alone,
passed the knuckle of her thumb over one swimming eye and then the
other, and bit her lips and swallowed down the sob that rose in her
throat.



CHAPTER XXVIII


It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard, bestowing no
glance upon the withered and tarnished show of the garden, and started
with a definite step down the street. The tendency to ruminative
loitering, which those who saw him abroad always associated with his
tall, spare figure, was not suggested today. He moved forward like a man
with a purpose.

All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book
opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with