Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/248

 care, and he hoped that none of them would ever know. Being found out was the great crime after all. For the rest he felt a kind of blissful contentment. He had misjudged women altogether. Here at his side, so silently asleep that you might have thought her dead, lay a girl so sweet, so loving, so gentle, so understanding, so solicitous that the whole world seemed changed for him and made more beautiful, and all his old cynicisms seemed to have been swept away.

It was wonderful how silently she slept. He stopped his own breathing that he might listen to hers. He could not hear it and became alarmed. . . He had seen a play recently at the Grand Guignol—a little horror of a play—in which just when it is high time for him to be gone by the latticed window in the dawn, the wife discovers that the lover has died. . . Edward shook Anne nervously by the shoulder and spoke her name.

She wasn't dead.

The whole of life—for a while—seemed to have changed for the better. The morning was exquisite—just like spring—and his mail consisted of one letter from Townley, containing commissions to illustrate two stories—these were being