“It’s not easy to prove anything to a woman who’s once taken an idea into her head.”

            “You’ve only got to show me the letter.”

            His hand slipped from hers and he drew back and shook his head.

            “You won’t?”

            “I can’t.”

            “Then the woman who wrote it is your mistress.”

            “No, dear. No.”

            “Not now, perhaps. I suppose she’s trying to get you back, and you’re struggling, out of pity for me. My poor Kenneth!”

            “I swear to you she never was my mistress.”

            Charlotte felt the tears rushing to her eyes. “Ah, that’s worse, then—that’s hopeless! The prudent ones are the kind that keep their hold on a man. We all know that.” She lifted her hands and hid her face in them.

            Her husband remained silent; he offered neither consolation nor denial, and at length, wiping away her tears, she raised her eyes almost timidly to his.

            “Kenneth, think! We’ve been married such a short time. Imagine what you’re making me suffer. You say you can’t show me this letter. You refuse even to explain it.”

            “I’ve told you the letter is on business. I will swear to that too.”

            “A man will swear to anything to screen a woman. If you want me to believe you, at least tell me her name. If you’ll do that, I promise you I won’t ask to see the letter.”

            There was a long interval of suspense, during which she felt her heart beating against her ribs in quick admonitory knocks, as if warning her of the danger she was incurring.

            “I can’t,” he said at length.

            “Not even her name?”

            “No.”

            “You can’t tell me anything more?”

            “No.”

            Again a pause; this time they seemed both to have reached the end of their arguments and to be helplessly facing each other across a baffling waste of incomprehension.

            Charlotte stood breathing rapidly, her hands against her breast. She felt as if she had run a hard race and missed the goal. She had meant to move her husband and had succeeded only in irritating him; and this error of reckoning seemed to change him into a stranger, a mysterious incomprehensible being whom no argument or entreaty of hers could reach. The curious thing was that she was aware in him of no hostility or even impatience, but only of a remoteness, an inaccessibility, far more difficult to overcome. She felt herself excluded, ignored, blotted out of his life. But after a moment or two, looking at him more calmly, she saw that he was suffering as much as she was. His distant guarded face was drawn with pain; the coming of the gray envelope, though it always cast a shadow, had never marked him as deeply as this discussion with his wife.

            Charlotte took heart; perhaps, after all, she had not spent her last shaft. She drew nearer and once more laid her hand on his arm. “Poor Kenneth! If you knew how sorry I am for you—”

            She thought he winced slightly at this expression of sympathy, but he took her hand and pressed it.

            “I can think of nothing worse than to be incapable of loving long,” she continued; “to feel the beauty of a great love and to be too unstable to bear its burden.”

            He turned on her a look of wistful reproach. “Oh, don’t say that of me. Unstable!”

            She felt herself at last on the right tack, and her voice trembled with excitement as she went on: “Then what about me and this other woman? Haven’t you already forgotten Elsie twice within a year?”

            She seldom pronounced his first wife’s name; it did not come naturally to her tongue. She flung it out now as if she were flinging some dangerous explosive into the open space between them, and drew back a step, waiting to hear the mine go off.

            Her husband did not move; his expression grew sadder, but showed no resentment. “I have never forgotten Elsie,” he said.

            Charlotte could not repress a faint laugh. “Then, you poor dear, between the three of us—”

            “There are not—” he began; and then broke off and put his hand to his forehead.

            “Not what?”

            “I’m sorry; I don’t believe I know what I’m saying. I’ve got a blinding headache.” He looked wan and furrowed enough for the statement to be true, but she was exasperated by his evasion.

            “Ah, yes; the gray-envelope headache!”

            She saw the surprise in his eyes. “I’d forgotten how closely I’ve been watched,” he said coldly. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go up and try an hour in the dark, to see if I can get rid of this neuralgia.”

            She wavered; then she said, with desperate resolution: “I’m sorry your head aches. But before you go I want to say that sooner or later this question must be settled between us.

            Someone is trying to separate us, and I don’t care what it costs me to find out who it is.” She looked him steadily in the eyes. “If it costs me your love, I don’t care! If I can’t have your confidence I don’t want anything from you.”

            He still looked at her wistfully. “Give me time.”

            “Time for what? It’s only a word to say.”

            “Time to show you that you haven’t lost my love or my confidence.”

            “Well, I’m waiting.”

            He turned toward the door, and then glanced back hesitatingly. “Oh, do wait, my love,” he said, and went out of the room.

            She heard his tired step on the stairs and the closing of his bedroom door above. Then she dropped into a chair and buried her face in her folded arms. Her first movement was one of compunction; she seemed to herself to have been hard, unhuman, unimaginative.