burning, lighting up the portraits of parents and friends, and the pretty trinkets upon her writing-table, so long familiar to him. When he reached the door of her bedroom he turned and went back.
At the end of each turn in his pacing back and forth, and especially on the hard-wood floor of his brightly lighted dining-room, he would stop and say to himself:—
"Yes, this must certainly be cut short; it must be decided; I must tell her my way of looking at it!"
And then he would turn back again.
"But what can I say? what decision can I make?" he would ask himself by the time he reached the drawing-room, and find no answer.
"But, after all," he would say, as he turned in the library, "what has been done? Nothing. She had a long talk with him. What of that? But whom does not a society woman talk with? To be jealous is degrading both her and me," he would say to himself as he reached her boudoir. But this reasoning, which had hitherto had such weight, had now lost its cogency.
From the door of her sleeping-room he returned again to the hall, but, as he crossed the dark drawing-room, he thought he heard a voice saying to him, "It is not so! the fact that the others noticed this signifies that there must be something in it."—And by the time he reached the dining-room again he was saying, "Yes, the thing must be decided, and broken short off." And once more in the drawing-room, just before he turned about, he would ask himself:—
"How can I decide? How can I tell her?"
And then he would ask himself, "What had happened?" and reply, "Nothing," and remember that jealousy is a feeling degrading to a woman; but again in the drawing-room he would feel persuaded that something had happened.
His thoughts, like his steps, followed the same circle, and he struck no new idea. He recognized this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her boudoir.
There, as he looked at her table, with its malachite writing-tablet, and a letter unfinished, his thoughts took
