What was the matter?
His hand shook a trifle now as he turned the knob of the bedroom door and pushed it softly open.
She was asleep.

He leaned over, not realizing that her every faculty was keenly alive to his presence, that she was acting a part.
"Throw something around yourself, Constance," he whispered hoarsely into her ear, as she moved with a little well-feigned start at being suddenly wakened, "and come into the studio.

There is something I must tell you tonight, my dear." "My dear!" she exclaimed bitterly, now seeming to rouse herself with an effort and pretending to put back a stray wisp of her dark hair in order to hide from him the tears that still lingered on her flushed cheeks.

"You can say that, Carlton, when it has been every night the same old threadbare excuse of working at the office until midnight ?" She set her face in hard lines, but could not catch his eye.
"Carlton Dunlap," she added in a tone that rasped his very soul, "I am nobody's fool.

I may not know much about bookkeeping and accounting, but I can add--and two and two, when the same man but different women compose each two, do not make four, according to my arithmetic, but three, from which,"-- she finished almost hysterically the little speech she had prepared, but it seemed to fall flat before the man's curiously altered manner--"from which I shall subtract one." She burst into tears.
"Listen," he urged, taking her arm gently to lead her to an easy-chair.
"No, no, no!" she cried, now thoroughly aroused, with eyes that again snapped accusation and defiance at him, "don't touch me.