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“Let us end this play-acting, at least,” he said. Ten minutes of fuming ended in tepid tea poured by a beautiful brown-haired girl.

He watched her in silence.

“It’s horrible,” he broke out. “You’re a strange woman, and there you sit, pouring tea out as if Who are you? I don’t know you.”

“Don’t you?” she said quietly. And then he remembered all the old talks with the old wife.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I don’t want to be a brute.”

“It’s no use my saying I’m sorry,” she said.

“Are you?” He leaned forward to put the question.

“We must make the best of it,” she said. “Perhaps Look here, don’t let’s speak of it till after Christmas; let’s just go on as we did before.”

So the days wore on. But the situation when Michael lived in torment in the company of his old wife was simplicity itself compared to his new life with a wife—young, beautiful, and a stranger, yet in all essentials his dearest friend. This discomfort grew daily—hourly branching out into ever fresh embarrassments—