"Perhaps," said David, with a contemptuous shrug of his
shoulders. "Anyway, I'm going."

"If you go on this voyage, David Spencer, you need never come
back here," said Isabella resolutely.

David had gone; he did not believe that she meant it. Isabella
believed that he did not care whether she meant it or not. David
Spencer left behind him a woman, calm outwardly, inwardly a
seething volcano of anger, wounded pride, and thwarted will.

He found precisely the same woman when he came home, tanned,
joyous, tamed for a while of his _wanderlust_, ready, with
something of real affection, to go back to the farm fields and
the stock-yard.

Isabella met him at the door, smileless, cold-eyed, set-lipped.

"What do you want here?" she said, in the tone she was accustomed
to use to tramps and Syrian peddlers.

"Want!" David's surprise left him at a loss for words. "Want!
Why, I--I--want my wife. I've come home."

"This is not your home. I'm no wife of yours. You made your
choice when you went away," Isabella had replied. Then she had
gone in, shut the door, and locked it in his face.

David had stood there for a few minutes like a man stunned. Then