And she had replied "No!" and in her loneliness of spirit married him who seemed to need her most out of those who admired her.
The door opens, and he comes in. He looks inquiringly at her, touches her hair half hesitatingly, and then stands with his hands thrust in his pockets and gnaws his mustache.
"Are you angry, little woman?"
"No," very quietly; "why should I be?"
She closes her eyes again, and after five minutes' silence he begins to undress. He does it very slowly, looking perplexedly at her. When he has finished, he stands with his back to the fire, an unlovely object in sleeping suit.
"Would you like to read her letter?"
She shakes her head.
"I suppose I ought to have sent her back her letters before, you know. She hadn't heard I was married."
"Yes," she interjects, "it would have been better to start with a clean bill; but why talk about it?"
He looks at her awhile, then gets into bed and watches her from behind the pages of the "Field." It seems unusually quiet. His watch that he has left in his waistcoat pocket, thrown across the back of a chair, seems to fill the whole room with a nervous tick.