its glowing fire and gleaming pottery, the pleasant homely routine of uneventful days, and wonder that he had ever found safety and comfort anything less than a miracle, Warren thought of the wife he had sacrificed, the children and home that had been his, unchallenged and undisputed, only a few months before.  He knew just where he had failed his wife.  He felt to-day that to comfort her again, to take her to dinner again, violets on her breast, and to see her loosen her veil, and lay aside her gloves with those little gestures so familiar and so infinitely dear would be heaven, no less!  What comradeship they had had, they two, what theatre trips, what summer days in the car, what communion over the first baby’s downy head, what conferences over the new papers and cretonnes for Home Dunes!

Girded by these and a hundred other sacred memories he went to Magsie, who was busy, the maid told him, with her hairdresser.  But she presently came out to him, wrapped snugly in a magnificent embroidered kimono, and with her masses of bright hair, almost dry, hanging about her lovely little face.  She had never in all their intercourse shown him quite this touch of intimacy before, and he felt with a little wince of his heart that it was a sign of her approaching possession.

“Greg, dear,” said Magsie seating herself on the arm of his chair, and resting her soft little person against him, “I’ve been thinking about you, and about the wonderful, wonderful way that all our troubles have come out!  If anyone had told us, two months ago, that Rachael would set you free, and that all this would have happened, we wouldn’t have believed it, would we?  I watched you walking down the street yesterday afternoon, and, oh, Greg, I hope I’m going to be a good wife to you; I hope I’m going to make up to you for all the misery you’ve had to bear!”

This was not the opening sentence Warren was expecting.  Magsie had been petulant the day before, and had pettishly declared that she would not wait a year for any man in the world.  Warren had at once seized the opening to say that he would not hold her to anything against her will, to be answered by a burst of tears, and an entreaty not to be “so mean.”  Then Magsie had to be soothed, and they had gone to tea as a part of that familiar process.  But to-day her mood was different; she was full of youthful enthusiasm for the future.

“You know I love Rachael, Greg, and of course she is a most exceptional woman,” bubbled Magsie happily, “but she doesn’t appreciate the fact that you’re a genius—­you’re not a little everyday husband, to be held to her ideas of what’s done and what isn’t done!  Big men are a law unto themselves.  If Rachael wants to hang over babies’ cribs, and scare you to death every time Jim sneezes—­”

Warren listened no further.  His mind went astray on a memory of the night Jim was feverish, a memory of Rachael in her trailing dull-blue robe, with her thick braids hanging over her shoulders.  He remembered that Jim was promised the circus if he would take his medicine; and how Rachael, with smiling lips and anxious eyes, had described the big lions and the elephants for the little restless potentate—–­