It was in the course of the year after the birth of the child that I became aware that something had gone wrong; a shadow seemed to have fallen upon them.  I became aware in the course of a few days which I spent with them in a little house by the sea, which they had taken for the summer, that all was not well.  My friend seemed to me distrait and heavy-hearted; his wife seemed to be pathetically affectionate and anxious.  There was no indifference or harshness apparent in his manner to her; indeed, he seemed to me to be extraordinarily considerate and tender.  One day—­we had gone off in the morning for a long ramble on the cliffs, leaving his wife in the company of an old school friend of hers who had come to stay with them—­he suddenly said to me, with a determined air, that he wished to consult me on a point.  I expressed the utmost readiness to be of use, and wondered in an agitated way what the matter could be; but he was silent for so long—­we were sitting on a grassy headland high above a broad, calm expanse of summer sea—­that I wondered if he had repented of his resolution.  At last he spoke.  I will not attempt to reproduce his words, but he said to me, with an astonishing calmness, that he found that he was ceasing to care for his wife:  he said very quietly that it was not that he cared for anyone else, but that his marriage had been a mistake; that he had engaged himself in a moment of passion, and that this had subsequently evaporated.  In the days of his first love he had poured out his heart to his wife, and now he no longer desired to do so; he did not wish any more to share his thoughts with her, and he was aware that she was conscious of this; he said that it was infinitely pathetic and distressing to him to see the efforts that she made to regain his confidence, and that he tried as far as he could to talk to her freely, but that he had no longer any sincere desire to do it, and that the effort was acutely painful; he was, he said, deeply distressed that she should be bound to him, and he indicated that he was fully aware that her own affection for him had undergone no change, and that it was not likely to do so.  He asked me what he had better do.  Should he continue to struggle with his reluctance to communicate his feelings to her; should he endeavour to make her acquiesce in altered relations; should he tell her frankly what had happened; or should he—­he confessed that he would prefer this himself—­arrange for a virtual separation?  “I feel,” he said, “that I have lost the only thing in the world I really care about—­my liberty.”  It sounds, as I thus describe the situation, as though my friend was acting in an entirely selfish and cold-blooded manner; but I confess that it did not strike me in that light at the time.  He spoke in a mood of dreary melancholy, as a man might speak who had committed a great mistake, and felt himself unequal to the responsibilities he had assumed.  He spoke of his wife with a deep compassionateness, as though intensely alive to the