to save myself—in the only way I could. Oh, Jim, if you 'd only been kinder!"
She sat with her head bowed, ashamed of her tears, the tears which he could not understand. He stared at her great crown of carefully coiled and plaited hair, shining in the light of the unshaded electric-bulb above them. It took him back to other days when he had looked at it with other eyes. And a comprehension of all he had lost crept slowly home to him. Poignant as was the thought that she had seemed beautiful to him and he might have once possessed her, this thought was obliterated by the sudden memory that in her lay centered everything that had caused his failure. She had been the weak link in his life, the life which he had so wanted to crown with success.
"You welcher!" he suddenly gasped, as he continued to stare at her. His very contemplation of her white face seemed to madden him. In it he seemed to find some signal and sign of his own dissolution, of his lost power, of his outlived authority. In her seemed to
