When Austin made his appearance, on the day following his return, his bleared eyes, his puffy, pasty cheeks, his shattered nerves, showed plainly enough how he had spent his time.  Although he was jumpy and irritable, he seemed determined by an assumption of high spirits and exaggerated friendliness to avert criticism.  Since Alaire spared him all reproaches, his efforts seemed to meet with admirable success.  Now Ed’s opinion of women was not high, for those with whom he habitually associated were of small intelligence; and, seeing that his wife continued to manifest a complete indifference to his past actions, he decided that his apprehensions had been groundless.  If Alaire remembered the Guzman affair at all, or if she had suspected him of complicity in it, time had evidently dulled her suspicions, and he was a little sorry he had taken pains to stay away so long.

Before many days, however, he discovered that this indifference of hers was not assumed, and that in some way or other she had changed.  Ed was accustomed, when he returned exhausted from a debauch, to seeing in his wife’s eyes a strained misery; he had learned to expect in her bearing a sort of pitying, hopeless resignation.  But this time she was not in the least depressed.  On the contrary, she appeared happier, fresher, and younger than he had seen her for a long time.  It was mystifying.  When, one morning, he overheard her singing in her room, he was shocked.  Over this phenomenon he meditated with growing amazement and a faint stir of resentment in his breast, for he lived a self-centered life, considering himself the pivot upon which revolved all the affairs of his little world.  To feel that he had lost even the power to make his wife unhappy argued that he had overestimated his importance.

At length, having sufficiently recovered his health to begin drinking again, he yielded one evening to an alcoholic impulse and, just as Alaire bade him good night, clumsily sought to force an explanation.

“See here!” he shot at her.  “What’s the matter with you lately?” He saw that he had startled her and that she made an effort to collect her wandering thoughts.  “You’re about as warm and wifely as a stone idol.”

“Am I any different to what I have always been?”

“Humph!  You haven’t been exactly sympathetic of late.  Here I come home sick, and you treat me like one of the help.  Don’t you think I have feelings?  Jove!  I’m lonesome.”

Alaire regarded him speculatively, then shook her head as if in answer to some thought.

In an obvious and somewhat too mellow effort to be friendly, Ed continued:  “Don’t let’s go on like this, Alaire.  You blame me for going away so much, but, good Lord! when I’m home I feel like an interloper.  You treat me like a cow-thief.”

“I’m sorry.  I’ve tried to be everything I should.  I’m the interloper.”