The utterly unawakened youth of her had always alternately fascinated and troubled him. Gambler that he was, he had once understood that patience is a gambler’s only stock in trade. But now for the first time in his career he found himself without it.

“You said,” he insisted, “that you’d love me when we were married.”

She turned her child’s eyes on him in faint surprise:

“A wife loves her husband always, doesn’t she?”

“Do you?”

“I suppose I shall.... I haven’t been married very long—long enough to feel as though I am really 97 married. When I begin to realise it I shall understand, of course, that I love you.”

97

It was the calm and immature reply of a little girl playing house. He knew it. He looked at her pure, perplexed profile of a child and knew that what he had said was futile—understood that it was meaningless to her, that it was only confusing a mind already dazed—a mind of which too much had been expected, too much demanded.

He leaned over and kissed the cold, almost colourless cheek; her little mechanical smile came back. Then they remembered the chauffeur behind them and Brandes reddened. He was unaccustomed to a man on the rumble.

“Could I talk to mother on the telephone when we get to New York?” she asked presently, still painfully flushed.

“Yes, darling, of course.”

“I just want to hear her voice,” murmured Rue.

“Certainly. We can send her a wireless, too, when we’re at sea.”

That interested her. She enquired curiously in regard to wireless telegraphy and other matters concerning ocean steamers.

In Albany her first wave of loneliness came over her in the stuffy dining-room of the big, pretentious hotel, when she found herself seated at a small table alone with this man whom she seemed, somehow or other, to have married.

As she did not appear inclined to eat, Brandes began to search the card for something to tempt her. And, glancing up presently, saw tears glimmering in her eyes.

For a moment he remained dumb as though 

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