The simple vanity and selfishness that made him unable to conceive any higher reason for his wife's loyalty than his own personal popularity and success, now that he no longer possessed that eclat, made him equally capable of the lowest suspicions.

He was a dishonored fugitive, broken in fortune and reputation--why should she not desert him! He had been unfaithful to her from wildness, from caprice, from the effect of those fascinating qualities; it seemed to him natural that she should be disloyal from more deliberate motives, and he hugged himself with that belief.

Yet there was enough doubt, enough of haunting suspicion that he had lost or alienated a powerful affection, to make him thoroughly miserable.

He returned his friend's grasp convulsively and buried his face upon his shoulder.

But he was not above feeling a certain exultation in the effect of his misery upon the dog-like, unreasoning affection of Patterson, nor could he entirely refrain from slightly posing his affliction before that sympathetic but melancholy man.