“To the Club,” I said.

My room was ready, my personal belongings, my clothes had been laid out, my photographs were on the dressing-table.  I took up, mechanically, the evening newspaper, but I could not read it; I thought of Maude, of the children, memories flowed in upon me,—­a flood not to be dammed....  Presently the club valet knocked at my door.  He had a dinner card.

“Will you be dining here, sir?” he inquired.

I went downstairs.  Fred Grierson was the only man in the dining-room.

“Hello, Hugh,” he said, “come and sit down.  I hear your wife’s gone abroad.”

“Yes,” I answered, “she thought she’d try it instead of the South Shore this summer.”

Perhaps I imagined that he looked at me queerly.  I had made a great deal of money out of my association with Grierson, I had valued very highly being an important member of the group to which he belonged; but to-night, as I watched him eating and drinking greedily, I hated him even as I hated myself.  And after dinner, when he started talking with a ridicule that was a thinly disguised bitterness about the Citizens Union and their preparations for a campaign I left him and went to bed.

Before a week had passed my painful emotions had largely subsided, and with my accustomed resiliency I had regained the feeling of self-respect so essential to my happiness.  I was free.  My only anxiety was for Nancy, who had gone to New York the day after my last talk with her; and it was only by telephoning to her house that I discovered when she was expected to return....  I found her sitting beside one of the open French windows of her salon, gazing across at the wooded hills beyond the Ashuela.  She was serious, a little pale; more exquisite, more desirable than ever; but her manner implied the pressure of control, and her voice was not quite steady as she greeted me.

“You’ve been away a long time,” I said.

“The dressmakers,” she answered.  Her colour rose a little.  “I thought they’d never get through.”

“But why didn’t you drop me a line, let me know when you were coming?” I asked, taking a chair beside her, and laying my hand on hers.  She drew it gently away.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I’ve been thinking it all over—­what we’re doing.  It doesn’t seem right, it seems terribly wrong.”

“But I thought we’d gone over all that,” I replied, as patiently as I could.  “You’re putting it on an old-fashioned, moral basis.”

“But there must be same basis,” she urged.  “There are responsibilities, obligations—­there must be!—­that we can’t get away from.  I can’t help feeling that we ought to stand by our mistakes, and by our bargains; we made a choice—­it’s cheating, somehow, and if we take this—­what we want—­we shall be punished for it.”

“But I’m willing to be punished, to suffer, as I told you.  If you loved me—­”