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spite of every effort on his part—as hotly defending her against himself. The look which now twice he had seen upon her face seemed to have awakened in him some blind partisanship for her which his reason disavowed. He could make no satisfactory explanation to himself of her part in taking him away in order to enable the search of his rooms to be made. In spite of it, he found himself constantly arraying every possible cxcuse in her favor, each of which only dismissed itself as absurd to make way other explanation equally futile. His sound sleep had been the sleep of exhaustion, following infinite maddening pointless repetitions of this process, which had recommenced again as soon as he was awake. Usually exact and methodical—for he had early established over himself that personal and bus-