--1.
Edith Fenton did not, however, follow Helen's advice and go to bed. She
went to her room and exchanged her dinner gown for a wrapper, and then
sat down before the wood fire in her chamber to wait for Arthur's
return.
It is a dismal vigil when a wife watches for her husband and questions
herself of the love between them. It was Edith's conviction that it is
a wife's duty to love her husband till death; not alone to fulfil her
wifely obligations, to preserve an outward semblance of affection, but
to love him in her heart according to the vows she has taken at the
altar. Had one told her that the limit of human power lay at self-
deception, and that, while it was possible to cheat one's self into the
belief of loving, affection could not be constrained, she would with
perfect honesty have replied as she had answered Helen in her allusion
to St. Theresa. She said to herself to-night, with unshaken conviction
and the concentration of all her will, that she would not cease to love
Arthur; but she could not wholly ignore the difference between the
unquestioning affection she had once given him and this love whose
force lay in her will.
A picture of Caldwell, painted a year ago just before his long hair had
been sacrificed at his boyish entreaties, hung over her mantel. She
looked up at it while her lip quivered and her eyes filled with tears.
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