"He's my employer. I've told you a hundred times … " His voice rose angrily, but he checked himself, resolved not to let her draw him into another wrangle over that threadbare grievance. She might think what she pleased—explaining anything to her was useless. To divert her attention he questioned ironically: "I suppose you talked me over with Hayes too?"

Her colour rose quickly, painting her cheekbones with the familiar feverish patches. "I never talk you over with anybody—not the way you mean."

"Well, you did talk with Hayes, didn't you?"

She looked at her husband half furtively, half in resentment. "He was almost the only person I knew in the place. Of course I talked with him. I didn't know you wouldn't want me to."

Vance was silent. Since the reconciliation at Paul's Landing he had never spoken to his wife of Hayes. At that time, in answer to his brief questioning, she had sobbingly admitted that Hayes was ready to marry her if he, Vance, didn't want her any longer. Hayes, it appeared, had arranged it all with Mrs. Tracy, and Laura Lou had been on the point of acquiescing because she was convinced that her husband no longer loved her and had been unfaithful to her with "that other woman."

Feeling her then so soft and surrendered on his breast, seeing her despair, and conscious of his own shortcomings, Vance had brushed aside these negligible intrigues, and sworn to her that they would begin a new life together. And from that day he had never questioned her about Hayes, had purposely avoided pronouncing his name. He had the feeling that the tie between himself and Laura Lou was even then too frail to stand the slightest strain… . But now the instinct of self-protection stirred him to cruelty; he, who was never cruel, desired to hurt his wife. "Do you see Hayes often? Does he come here? He's just the kind to sneak round after you when he knows I'm at the office… ." How stupid the words sounded when he had spoken them! How little bearing they had on the intrinsic flaw in his relation with Laura Lou!

She hesitated a moment; then she said simply: "I've never talked with him but once since we've been here, one day when I met him in the street."

"Oh, that's all right; I didn't mean—I'm no gaoler: you can see him here at the house all you want to," he grumbled, irresolute and half ashamed.

"When I spoke to him just now at the gallery," she continued, "all I did was to thank him for the lovely things he said about you when we first came in."

"The lovely—?" Vance echoed, forgetting, in his blank amazement, what had gone before.