That is one solution of it--the one which her friends give out.

I will tell you the truth.

It is that I was twenty years older than she, that she loved me as a young girl loves an older man who had been brought up almost in her own family, for our properties adjoined, and that when she woke up, it was to find out that I was not the man she would have married had she been given a few more years' time in which to make up her mind.
"When she ran away I lost my bearings.

I used to sit in my room in the club for hours at a time, staring at the morning paper, never seeing the print; thinking only of my wife and our life together--all of it, from the day we were married.

I recalled her childish nature, her fits of sudden temper always ending in tears, and her wilfulness.