Wilbur looked hurt.  “Doesn’t make much difference how the old man looks, does it, dear?” said he.

“Let me see the samples,” Margaret returned with an effort.  There were depths beyond depths; there were bottomless quicksands in a lie.  How could she have known?

That night Wilbur looked into his wife’s bedroom at midnight.  “Awake?” he asked in his monosyllabic fashion.

“Yes.”

“Say, old girl, Von Rosen has just this minute gone.  Guess it’s a match fast enough.”

“I always thought it would be Alice,” returned Margaret wearily.  Love affairs did seem so trivial to her at this juncture.

“Alice Mendon has never cared a snap about getting married any way,” returned Wilbur.  “Some women are built that way.  She is.”

Margaret did not inquire how he knew.  If Wilbur had told her that he had himself asked Alice in marriage, it would have been as if she had not heard.  All such things seemed very unimportant to her in the awful depths of her lie.  She said good-night in answer to Wilbur’s and again fell to thinking.  There was no way out, absolutely no way.  She must live and die with this secret self-knowledge which abased her, gnawing at the heart.  Wilbur had told her that he believed that her authorship of The Poor Lady might be the turning point of his election.  She was tongue-tied in a horrible spiritual sense.  She was disfigured for the rest of her life and she could never once turn away her eyes from her disfigurement.

The light from Annie Eustace’s window shone in her room for two hours after that.  She wondered what she was doing and guessed Annie was writing a new novel to take the place of the one of which she had robbed her.  An acute desire which was like a pain to be herself the injured instead of the injurer possessed her.  Oh, what would it mean to be Annie sitting there, without leisure to brood over her new happiness, working, working, into the morning hours and have nothing to look upon except moral and physical beauty in her mental looking-glass.  She envied the poor girl, who was really working beyond her strength, as she had never envied any human being.  The envy stung her, and she could not sleep.  The next morning she looked ill and then she had to endure Wilbur’s solicitude.

“Poor girl, you overworked writing your splendid book,” he said.  Then he suggested that she spend a month at an expensive seashore resort and another horror was upon Margaret.  Wilbur, she well knew, could not afford to send her to such a place, but was innocently, albeit rather shamefacedly, assuming that she could defray her own expenses from the revenue of her book.  He would never call her to account as to what she had done with the wealth which he supposed her to be reaping.  She was well aware of that, but he would naturally wonder within himself.  Any man would.  She said that she was quite well, that she hated a big hotel, and much preferred home during the hot season, but she heard the roar of these new breakers.  How could she have dreamed of the lifelong disturbance which a lie could cause?