“Edith!”

He leaned upon the balustrade.  The nurse, coming out, warned him.  “Indeed, you’d better stay in your room.”

“I’m all right.  Please don’t worry.  You ’tend to your knitting, and I’ll take care of myself.”

She insisted, however, on bringing out a chair and a rug.  “Perhaps it will be a change for you to sit in the hall,” she conceded, and tucked him in, and he found himself trembling a little from weakness, and glad of the support which the chair gave him.

It seemed very pleasant to sit there with Edith smiling at him.  For the first time in many weeks his mind was at rest.  Ever since Hilda had come he had felt the pressure of an exciting presence.  He felt this morning free from it, and glad to be free.

What a wife Edith had been!  Holding him always to his highest and best, yet loving him even when he stumbled and fell.  Bending above him in her beautiful charity and understanding, raising him up, fostering his self-respect in those moments of depression when he had despised himself.

What other woman would have done it?  What other woman would have kept her love for him through it all?  For she had loved him.  It had never been his money with her.  She would have clung to him in sickness and in poverty.

But Hilda loved his money.  He knew it now as absolutely as if she had said it.  For the first time in weeks he saw clearly.  Last night his eyes had been opened.

He had been roused towards morning by those soft sounds in the second room, which he had heard more than once in the passing weeks.  In his feverish moments, it had not seemed unlikely that his wife might be there, coming back to haunt, with her gentle presence, the familiar rooms.  There was, indeed, her light step, the rustle of her silken garments—.

Half-asleep he had listened, then had opened his eyes to find the night-lamp burning, Hilda’s book under it and Hilda gone!

The minutes passed as still his ears were strained.  There was not a sound in the house but that silken rustle.  He wondered if he sought Edith if she would speak to him.  He rose and reached for his dressing gown.

Hilda had grown careless; there was no screen in front of the second door, and the crack was wide.  The General standing in the dark saw her before his wife’s mirror, wearing his wife’s jewels, wrapped in the cloak which his wife had worn—­triumphant—­beautiful!

It was that air of triumph which repelled him.  It was a discordant note in the Cophetua theme.  He had liked her in her nurse’s white.  In the trappings which did not belong to her she showed herself a trifle vulgar—­less than a lady.

He had crept back to bed, and wide-awake, he had worked it all out in his mind.  It was his money which Hilda wanted, the things that he could give her; he meant to her pink parasols and satin slippers, and diamonds and pearls and ermines and sables, and a check-book, with unlimited credit everywhere.