The Open Window: Tales of the Months. Mabel Osgood Wright

yield this point?”

      “Yes, I will yield the point of being your wife,” and the woman, suddenly feeling the need of greater support than the touch of finger tips upon the table gave her, moved slowly toward a deep chair before the fire and dropped from view behind its screening back.

      For a full minute the man stood staring at the place where she was not, then turned and crashed from the room, overturning a porcelain jar in his blind haste.

      Ten minutes later the front door shut.

      An hour later, Mrs. Hasleton’s maid was packing a suit case while her mistress, dressed in a street gown and seated at her desk, wrote half a dozen notes. Presently looking up, she said: “Elise, you will follow me on Tuesday, as I had arranged, with the trunks packed for a two weeks’ visit. I have written the directions for you.” Then, glancing through some time-tables, “Tell Peter to be here at two to drive me to the station.”

      “A bad day for travel? Not at all; the snow packs in the streets, that in the open country blows off and amounts to nothing.”

      Why she did it, she could not have told, but Mrs. Hasleton chose the least direct way of reaching her destination; and, instead of going as usual to the parlour car, entered a day coach, where she sat tapping her foot nervously, waiting for the train to pull out, without so much as lifting her heavy brown veil.

      It was in itself a novel sensation, this leaving with no one to say good-by, to go to a city where no one expected her; for she had determined to spend the next two days at a woman’s club to which she belonged, going to the Barneys’ on the following Tuesday, that being the time of the invitation. She had not yet told her change of destination to Elise.

      The man strode about the half-cleared streets until he was physically almost exhausted, and then entered his club, where he hid himself in a corner, curling up like a half-sick and surly dog who both craves and resents sympathy. A group of younger men entered, joking each other and harmlessly boisterous. Spying Hasleton, they proceeded to unearth him from his lair. Shouted one, “We have a scheme afoot for Sunday, and we want a steady head like yours to come along and collect us and see that we start for home straight on Monday morning.”