hurt. Avery received this calmly. He was used to it. To do him justice, he did not know how cross he was. He was used to that, too. And so was she. The baby was ailing, besides, and things went hard. The sick woman's breath began to shorten again; and the coy color which had been so hard to win to her lips fled from them unobserved. The doctor was not called; Helen Thorne was out of town; and so it happened that no one noticed—for, as we say, Marshall Avery had the toothache.

One night he came home late, and as irritable as better men than he may be, and be forgiven for it, for the sake of that species of modern toothache in which your dentist neither extracts nor relieves, but devotes his highly developed and unhappy ingenuity to the demonic process which is known as "saving a tooth."

"He calls it killing a nerve," sputtered Avery. "I should call it killing a patient. This performance is the Mauser bullet of up-to-date dentistry. It explodes all over you— Oh, do let me alone, Jean! You can't do anything for me. A man does n't want to be bothered. Go and lie down, and look after yourself. Where is that hot water? I asked for alcohol—laudanum—some confounded thing. Can't anybody in this house do anything for me? I don't trouble them very often."

"It's Molly's evening out," said Mrs. Avery patiently. "I 'll get everything as fast as I can, dear." She was up and down stairs a good deal; she did not notice, herself, how often. And when she got to bed at last, she cried—she could not help it. It was something he had said. Oh, no matter what! But she did not know how to bear it, for she was so exhausted, and sobs, which were her mortal enemy, overcame her as soon as she was alone.

He did not hear her, for the door was shut between their rooms, and he was quite occupied with his Mauser bullet. He had fallen into the habit of shutting the door when the second baby was born; he maintained that the boy was worse than Pink. Pink cried like a lady, but the boy bellowed like a megatherium.

A little before half-past ten she heard him get up and dress and stir about. He opened the door, and said, without coming in:—

"I 'm going to have this blank thing out. I 'm going to Armstrong's house. I won't stand it another hour. I 'll be home presently."

She tried to tell him how sorry she was, and to say some one of the little loving, wifely things with whose warm, sun-penetrated atmosphere she so enveloped his life that he took them as a matter of course. It is doubtful if he heard her altogether, for her voice was fainter than usual.

"Won't you come in a minute?" she pleaded. He did hear that. But he did not come.

"Oh, I can't stop now," he returned petulantly. "I 'm in such blank torment. I 'll be back; I may go to the club afterwards, and play it off at something, but I'll be back before midnight."

"Dear?" she called then, in an agitated voice; it was not like hers, and not like her; if he had perceived this—but he perceived nothing. "I don't feel quite well"—she tried to say. But he was halfway downstairs. These five words wandered after him like the effort of a dumb spirit to communicate with deaf life.

He thrust himself savagely into his overcoat, turned up the collar over his toothache, slammed the front door, and went.

Jean listened to his footfall on the steps, on the sidewalk; the nervous, irritable, uneven sound softened and ceased. She was quite awake, and her mind moved with feverish vitality. She was usually a good sleeper for a sick person; but that night she found herself too ill for any form of rest. The difficulty that she had in breathing increased with an insidious slowness which she had learned to fear as the most obstinate form of her malady. The room grew empty of air. The candle burned blue to her eyes. The shutting of the front door seemed like the shutting of that to which she would not give a name, for terror's sake. As her husband's footsteps passed from the power of her strained ears to overtake them, she found herself wondering how they would sound when they passed for the last time from her presence, she lying under a load of flowers, with the final look of the sky turned compassionately upon her. Then she scorned herself—she was the most healthy-minded invalid who ever surmounted the morbidness of physical suffering—and thrust out her hands from her face, as if she were thrusting a camera which was using defective plates away from her brain.

"If he had only come in a minute!" she said, sobbing a little. "If he had only come in and kissed me good-night"—

She did not add: "He would have seen that I was too ill. He would not have left me."

The candle burned faintly, and grew more faint. There seemed to be smoke in the room. The baby stirred in his crib, and Pink, from the nursery, called, "Mummer dee!" in her sleep. The air grew so dense that it seemed to Jean to be packed about her like smothering wool. She rang the electric bell for Molly, or she thought she did. But Molly did not answer, and the nursery door was shut.

There was nothing morbid in Jean's thoughts by this time; no more gruesome vision; no touching situation whatever presented itself; she did not see herself as a pathetic object; even her husband vanished from her consciousness. Kind or harsh—retreating footsteps or returning arms—light laughter on his lips or true love in his eyes—she thought of him not at all. He disappeared from her emergency like some diminishing figure that had fled from the field of a great battle. For the lonely woman knew now, at last, that she was wrestling with mortal peril. She had always wondered if she would know it from its counterfeits when it really came—there were so many counterfeits! She had asked, as all men ask, what it would be like. A long contention? A short, sharp thrust? Agony? Stupor? Struggle, or calm? Now she wondered not at all. There was nothing dramatic or exciting, or even solemn, in her condition. All her being resolved itself into the simple effort to get her breath.

Suddenly this effort ceased. She had struggled up against the pillows to call "Molly! Molly!" when she found that she could not call Molly. As if her head had been under water, the function of breathing battled, and surrendered. Then there befell her swiftly the most beatific instant that she had ever known.

"I am tired out," she thought; "and I am going to sleep. I did not die, after all." She was aware of turning her face, as her head dropped back on her pillows, before she sank into ecstasy.

The night was fair and cool. There was some wind, and the trees in the Park winced under a glittering frost. Avery noticed this as he hurried to Dr. Armstrong's. The leaves seemed to curl in a sensitive, womanish fashion, as if their feelings had been hurt before they received their death-stroke.

"It is the third of November," he thought. His feet rang on the sidewalk sharply, and he ran up the long steps with his gloved hand held to his cheek.

Physical pain always made him angry. He was irritable with Armstrong, who had none too good a temper himself; and the two men sparred a little before the dentist consented to remove the tooth.

Avery was surprised to find how short and simple an affair this was.

"I believe I 'll run into the Club," he observed as he put on his coat.

"Better go home," replied the dentist. "No? Then I 'll go along with you."

The two men started out in silence.

Avery looked across at the wincing leaves on the trees of the Park. The tower of the Church of the Happy Saints showed black against the sky. The club was only around the corner, and he was glad of it, for the night felt unpleasantly cold to him; he shivered as he entered the hot, bright, luxurious place; it was heavy with tobacco; the click of billiard-balls and the clink of a glass sounded to his ear with a curious distinctness above the laughter and the chat with which the house seemed to rock and echo.

Romer was there—Tom