Hamilton's abstraction was dissipated as the familiar music of Cicily's voice beat gently on his ears.

"Yes--oh, yes, they've gone." His voice was colorless. His eyes went out to the array of figures that sprawled recklessly over the sheet before him.

But the young woman was not to be frustrated in her intention by such indifference on his part. She spoke again, at once, a little more loudly:

"Tell me: Did you come out all right?"

Hamilton raised his head with an impatient movement. Evidently, this persistence was a distracting influence--a displeasing. There was harshness in his voice as he replied:

"Did I come out all right? Well, yes--since I came out at all. Oh, yes!"

His voice mounted in the scale, under the impulse of a sudden access of rage against his enemies. He spoke with a savage rapidity of utterance: "And I can lick Carrington any day in the week. Why, I've already put him out. It's Morton--that old fox Morton who's got me guessing.... What do you think? They even had the nerve to threaten me. Of course, it was in a round-about way; but it was a threat all the same. They threatened to close up the Hamilton factory. Gad! the nerve of it!"

"They threatened to close up your factory, Charles?" Cicily exclaimed, astonished and angry. "But you own the Hamilton factory. What have they to do with it? The impudence of them!"

"Yes, I own the factory, all right," the husband agreed. "But, you see--" Hamilton broke off abruptly, and was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, the liveliness was gone from his voice: it was become quietly patronizing. "Oh, let's forget it, dear. I must be going dotty.

I'll be talking business with you, the first thing I know."

"I only wish you would!" Cicily answered, with a note of pleading in her tones.

"Nonsense!" was the gruff exclamation. "The idea of talking business with you. That would be a joke, wouldn't it?" He spoke banteringly, with no perception of the gravity in his wife's desire to share in this phase of his life. But he looked up from the papers after a moment into his wife's face. She had turned from him, and then had reclined wearily in the chair opposite him, whence she had been staring at him with a tormenting feeling of impotence. The expression on her face was such that Hamilton realized her distress, without having any clue to its cause.

"Now, sweetheart, what's wrong?" he questioned. He was half-sympathetic over her apparent misery, half-annoyed.

Cicily, with the intuitive sensitiveness of a woman to recognize a lover's hostile feeling beneath the spoken words, was acutely conscious of the annoyance; she ignored the modic.u.m of sympathy. To conceal her hurt, she had resort to a fict.i.tious gaiety that was ill calculated, however, to deceive, for the stress of her disappointment was very great.

"The matter with me?" she repeated, with an a.s.sumption of surprise.

"Why, the matter with me is that I'm so happy--that's all!"

"Cicily!" Now, at last, the husband was both shocked and grieved over his wife's mood.

"Yes, that's it--happy!" the suffering girl repeated. "Why, I'm so happy--just so happy--that I could scream!"

Hamilton leaned forward in his chair, to regard his wife scrutinizingly.

He was filled with alarm over the nervous, almost hysterical, condition in which he now beheld her.

"Cicily, are you well?" he asked. There was a distinct quaver of fear in his voice. "You look--strange, somehow."

"Oh, not at all!" came the flippant retort. "It's merely that you haven't really taken a good look at me lately--until just this minute.

So, of course, I'd look a bit strange to you."

It must be remembered that Hamilton, although usually intelligent, had a clear conscience and no suspicion whatsoever as to any culpability on his part in his relations with his wife: thus it was that now he was wholly impervious to the sarcasm of her reference, which he answered with the utmost seriousness.

"My dear, I saw you this morning, last night--oh, heaps of times, every day."

"Oh, your physical eyes have seen; but your mind, your heart, your soul--the true you--hasn't seen me for I don't know how long."

This cryptic explanation was too subtle for Hamilton to grasp while yet his brain was fogged by the intricacies of his business affairs. He gazed on his wife in puzzled fashion for a few seconds, then abandoned the problem as one altogether beyond his solving. To clear up a vague suspicion that this might be some new astonishing display of a woman's indirect wiles, he put a question:

"My dear, do you want a new automobile, or a doctor?"

"Neither!" came the crisp reply; and for once the musical voice was almost harsh, "I want a husband!"

"Good Lord! Another?" Hamilton was pained and scandalized, as, indeed, was but natural before a confession so indecorous seemingly and so unflattering to himself.

"I don't want the one I have now," Cicily affirmed, with great emphasis.

She rather enjoyed the manner in which the man shrank under her declaration. But he said nothing as she paused: he was momentarily too dumfounded for speech, "I want my first one back," Cicily concluded.

Hamilton gaped at his wife, powerless to do aught beyond grope in mental blackness for some ray of understanding as to this horrible revelation made by the woman he loved.

"You--you want your first one back!" he repeated stupidly, at last. Of a sudden, a gust of fury shook him. "G.o.d!" he cried savagely. "And I thought I knew that girl!"

Cicily rested unperturbed before the outbreak. She was absorbed in her own torment, with no sentiment to spare for the temporary anguish she was inflicting on her husband, which, in her opinion, he richly deserved.

"You did know me once," she answered, coldly. "That was before you changed toward me."

The injustice of this charge, as he deemed it, was beyond Hamilton's powers of endurance. He sprung from his chair, and stood glowering down on Cicily, who bore the stern accusation of his eyes without flinching.

The pallor of her face was a little more p.r.o.nounced than usual, less touched from within with the hue of abounding health, and her crimson mouth was less tender than it was wont to be. But she leaned back in her chair in a posture of grace that displayed to advantage the slender, curving charm of her body, and her eyes, shining golden in the soft light of the room, met the man's steadfastly, fearlessly.

"I--changed--to you!" Hamilton stormed. "Cicily! Cicily! What madness!

You know--oh, absurd! Why, Cicily, I love you.... I think of you always!"

"Oh, yes, you love me," Cicily agreed, contemptuously, "You think of me always--when your other love will let you."

"Cicily!"

"I mean it," came uncompromisingly, in answer to Hamilton's look of horror. "I mean every word of it!"

"Cicily," the husband besought, as a great dread fell on his soul, "remember, you are my wife--my love!"

"Yes, I'm one of them." The tone was icy; the gaze fixed on his face was unwavering.

But this utterance was too sinister to be borne. The pride of the man in his own faithfulness was outraged. His voice was low when he spoke again, yet in it was a quality that the young wife had never heard before. It frightened her sorely, although she concealed its effect by a mighty effort of will.

"That is an insult to you and to me, Cicily. It is an insult I cannot--I will not--permit."

It was evident to Cicily that she had carried the war in this direction far enough; she hastened her retreat.

"Oh, I didn't say that you were in love with another woman," she explained, with an excellent affectation of carelessness. "For that matter, I know very well that you're not." Then, as Hamilton regarded her with a face blankly uncomprehending, she went on rapidly, with something of the venomous in her voice: "Sometimes, I wish you were.

Then, I'd fight her, and beat her. It would give me something to do."

She paused for a moment, and laughed bitterly. "Oh, please, Charles, do fall in love with some other woman, won't you?"

Hamilton started toward the telephone in the hall.

"It's the doctor you want, not the automobile," he called over his shoulder.

"Nonsense!" Cicily cried. "Stop!" And, as he turned back reluctantly, she went on with her explanation: "No, it isn't the lure of some siren in a Paquin dress--or undress: it's the lure of the game--the great, horrid, hideous business game, which has got you, just as it's got most of the American husbands who are worth having. That's the lure we American women can't overcome; that's the rival who is breaking our hearts. You are the man of business, Charles--I'm the woman out of a job! That's all there is to it."

Hamilton listened dazedly to this fluent discourse, the meaning of which was not altogether clear to him. He frowned in bewilderment, as he again seated himself in the chair opposite his wife. He could think of nothing with which to rebuke her diatribe, save the stock plat.i.tudes of a past generation, and to these necessarily he had immediate recourse.