“But you could not have had the smallest idea of serving me when you made all those observations concerning me.”

“I had long desired to serve your husband, ma’am.  Never from curiosity would I have asked a single question about you or your affairs.  But what came to me I was at liberty to understand if I could, and use for lawful ends if I might.”

Juliet was silent.  She dared hardly think, lest the gnome should see her very thoughts in their own darkness.  Yet she yielded to one more urgent question that kept pushing to get out.  She tried to say the words without thinking of the thing, lest he should thereby learn it.

“I suppose then you have your own theory as to my reasons for seeking shelter with Miss Drake for a while?” she said—­and the moment she said it, felt as if some demon had betrayed her, and used her organs to utter the words.

“If I have, ma’am,” answered Polwarth, “it is for myself alone.  I know the sacredness of married life too well to speculate irreverently on its affairs.  I believe that many an awful crisis of human history is there passed—­such, I presume, as God only sees and understands.  The more carefully such are kept from the common eye and the common judgment, the better, I think.”

If Juliet left him with yet a little added fear, it was also with growing confidence, and some comfort, which the feeble presence of an infant humility served to enlarge.

Polwarth had not given much thought to the question of the cause of their separation.  That was not of his business.  What he could not well avoid seeing was, that it could hardly have taken place since their marriage.  He had at once, as a matter of course, concluded that it lay with the husband, but from what he had since learned of Juliet’s character, he knew she had not the strength either of moral opinion or of will to separate, for any reason past and gone, from the husband she loved so passionately; and there he stopped, refusing to think further.  For he found himself on the verge of thinking what, in his boundless respect for women, he shrank with deepest repugnance from entertaining even as a transient flash of conjecture.

One trifle I will here mention, as admitting laterally a single ray of light upon Polwarth’s character.  Juliet had come to feel some desire to be useful in the house beyond her own room, and descrying not only dust, but what she judged disorder in her landlord’s little library—­for such she chose to consider him—­which, to her astonishment in such a mere cottage, consisted of many more books than her husband’s, and ten times as many readable ones, she offered to dust and rearrange them properly:  Polwarth instantly accepted her offer, with thanks—­which were solely for the kindness of the intent, he could not possibly be grateful for the intended result—­and left his books at her mercy.  I do not know another man who, loving his books like Polwarth, would have