Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/380

370, for she never even looks at him without such love in her eyes—I did n't think Sue had it in her. Fred is quite jealous. He says that the other Mrs. Tom Lawton is the woman he ought to have married. She is a woman that knows how to appreciate a husband."

And now, where other stories end, this story begins. For it was four years after Susan Lawton's marriage that she had the "escape" which it is the purpose of my story to tell, and all this which has gone before has been merely what it was necessary that one should know in order to understand the rest.

The relation between Tom and Susan had grown constantly closer and sweeter. It was a very peculiar one. People did not always understand it. There were those who were shallow enough to say that Tom Lawton did not appreciate his wife; but nobody would have laughed more heartily than Sue herself at such an accusation against Tom. He was still as reticent, undemonstrative, as he had been in the days of his strange loverhood; but he was as sensitive yet to Susan's voice, look, touch, as if he were still her lover, and not her husband. What woman does not know how much this means! How few women, alas, have had it given to them ro know the joy of it!

One day a letter came to Sue from Bell, who was traveling in Europe with her husband.

"Only think," Bell wrote, "poor Mrs. Balloure