That seemed clear and satisfactory.  But, strangely, her mind jumped to the somewhat unexpected conclusion, “And I’ll not see him again.”

She wrote Dory that night a long, long letter, the nearest to a love letter she had ever written him.  She brought Ross in quite casually; yet—­What is the mystery of the telltale penumbra round the written word?  Why was it that Dory, in far-away Vienna, with the memory of her strong and of the Villa d’Orsay dim, reading the letter for the first time, thought it the best he had ever got from her; and the next morning, reading it again, could think of nothing but Ross, and what Adelaide had really thought about him deep down in that dark well of the heart where we rarely let even our own eyes look intently?

CHAPTER XXIII

A STROLL IN A BYPATH

Ross had intended to dine at the club; but Mrs. Hastings’s trap was hardly clear of the grounds when he, to be free to think uninterruptedly, set out through the woods for Point Helen.

Even had he had interests more absorbing than pastimes, display, and money-making by the “brace” game of “high finance” with its small risks of losing and smaller risks of being caught, even if he had been married to a less positive and incessant irritant than Theresa was to him, he would still not have forgotten Adelaide.  Forgetfulness comes with the finished episode, never with the unfinished.  In the circumstances, there could be but one effect from seeing her again.  His regrets blazed up into fierce remorse, became the reckless raging of a passion to which obstacles and difficulties are as fuel to fire.

Theresa, once the matter of husband-getting was safely settled, had no restraint of prudence upon her self-complacence.  She “let herself go” completely, with results upon her character, her mind, and her personal appearance that were depressing enough to the casual beholder, but appalling to those who were in her intimacy of the home.  Ross watched her deteriorate in gloomy and unreproving silence.  She got herself together sufficiently for as good public appearance as a person of her wealth and position needed to make, he reasoned; what did it matter how she looked and talked at home where, after all, the only person she could hope to please was herself?  He held aloof, drawn from his aloofness occasionally by her whim to indulge herself in what she regarded as proofs of his love.  Her pouting, her whimpering, her abject but meaningless self-depreciation, her tears, were potent, not for the flattering reason she assigned, but because he, out of pity for her and self-reproach, and dread of her developing her mother’s weakness, would lash himself into the small show of tenderness sufficient to satisfy her.

And now, steeped in the gall of as bitter a draught as experience forces folly to drink anew each day to the dregs—­the realization that, though the man marries the money only, he lives with the wife only—­Ross had met Adelaide again.  “I’ll go to Chicago in the morning,” was his conclusion.  “I’ll do the honorable thing”—­he sneered at himself—­“since trying the other would only result in her laughing at me and in my being still more miserable.”