“Hilmer’s going south himself next week...  On business, he says.”  She laughed harshly.  “I wonder if they both think me quite a fool! ...  If he succeeds this time she’s done for!”

Fred Starratt stirred in his seat.

“Don’t deceive yourself,” he found himself saying, coldly; “whatever else my wife is, she’s no fool...  Remember, she wrote me a letter every week.  She looks over her cards before she plays them...A few months more or less don’t—­”

He broke off, suddenly amazed at his cruelty.  Mrs. Hilmer’s expression changed from arrested exultation to fretful appeal.

“I have only six months to live,” she wailed.  “If I could walk just for a day...an hour...five minutes!”

She covered her face in her hands.

“What do you expect me to do?” he asked, helplessly, with a certain air of resignation.

She took her fingers from her eyes.  A crafty smile illumined her features.  “How should I know? ...What do men do in such cases?...She will be gone two weeks.  I pray God she may never enter this house again.  But that is in your hands.”

He felt suddenly cold all over, as if she had delivered an enemy into his keeping.  She still loved Axel Hilmer...loved him to the point of hatred.  What she wished for was his head upon a charger.  With other backgrounds and other circumstances crowding her to fury she would have danced for her boon like the daughter of Herodias.  As it was, she sat like some pagan goddess, full of sinister silences, impotent, yet unconquered.

And again Storch’s prophetic words swept him: 

“Like a field broken to the plow!”

There was a terrible beauty in the phrase.  Was sorrow the only plowshare that turned the quiescent soul to bountiful harvest?  Was it better to reap a whirlwind than to see a shallow yield of unbroken content wither to its sterile end?

* * * * *

He found Ginger’s lodgings that night, in a questionable quarter of the town, but she did not respond to his knock upon the door.

“Why don’t you try the streets, then?” Mrs. Hilmer’s sneer recurred with all its covert bitterness.

The suggestion made him sick.  And he had fancied all along that ugliness had lost the power to move him ... that he was prepared for the harsh facts of existence!

He waited an hour upon the street corner, and when she came along finally she was in the company of a man...  He grew suddenly cold all over.  When they passed him he could almost hear his teeth chattering.  They disappeared, swallowed up in the sinister light of a beguiling doorway.  He stared for a moment stupidly, then turned and fled, looking neither to the right nor to the left.  He realized now that he had reached the heights of bitterest ecstasy and the depths of profound humiliation.

Storch was alone, bending close to the lamp, reading, when Fred Starratt broke in upon him.  He did not lift his head.