That was the thing that had gone out of life.  Hope.  Her loathing of Louis Akers was gone.  She did not hate him.  Rather she felt toward him a sort of numbed indifference.  She wished never to see him again, but the revolt that had followed her knowledge of the conditions under which he had married her was gone.  She tried to understand his viewpoint, to make allowances for his lack of some fundamental creed to live by.  But as the days went on, with that healthy tendency of the mind to bury pain, she found him, from a figure that bulked so large as to shut out all the horizon of her life, receding more and more.

But always he would shut off certain things.  Love, and marriage, and of course the hope of happiness.  Happiness was a thing one earned, and she had not earned it.

After the scene at the Saint Elmo, when he had refused to let her go, and when Willy Cameron had at last locked him in the bedroom of the suite and had taken her away, there had followed a complete silence.  She had waited for some move or his part, perhaps an announcement of the marriage in the newspapers, but nothing had appeared.  He had commenced a whirlwind campaign for the mayoralty and was receiving a substantial support from labor.

The months at the house on Cardew Way seemed more and more dream-like, and that quality of remoteness was accentuated by the fact that she had not been able to talk to Elinor.  She had telephoned more than once during the week, but a new maid had answered.  Mrs. Doyle was out.  Mrs. Doyle was unable to come to the telephone.  The girl was a foreigner, with something of Woslosky’s burr in her voice.

Lily had not left the house since her return.  During that family conclave which had followed her arrival, a stricken thing of few words and long anxious pauses, her grandfather had suggested that.  He had been curiously mild with her, her grandfather.  He had made no friendly overtures, but he had neither jibed nor sneered.

“It’s done,” he had said briefly.  “The thing now is to keep her out of his clutches.”  He had turned to her.  “I wouldn’t leave the house for few days, Lily.”

It was then that Willy Cameron had gone.  Afterwards she thought that he must have been waiting, patiently protective, to see how the old man received her.

Her inability to reach Elinor began to dismay her, at last.  There was something sinister about it, and finally Howard himself went to the Doyle house.  Lily had come back on Thursday, and on the following Tuesday he made his call, timing it so that Doyle would probably be away from home.  But he came back baffled.

“She was not at home,” he said.  “I had to take the servant’s word for it, but I think the girl was lying.”

“She may be ill.  She almost never goes out.”

“What possible object could they have in concealing her illness?” Howard said impatiently.