It was eleven o' clock that night when Mr. Pontellier returned from Klein' s hotel. He was in an excellent humor, in high spirits, and very talkative. His entrance awoke his wife, who was in bed and fast asleep when he came in, He talked to her while he undressed, telling her anecdotes and bits of news and gossip that he had gathered during the day. From his trousers pockets he took a fistful of crumpled bank notes and a good deal of silver coin, which he piled on the bureau indiscriminately with keys, knife, handkerchief, and whatever else happened to be in his pockets, she was overcome with sleep, and answered him with little half utterances. He thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation. Mr. Pontellier had forgotten the bonbons and peanuts for the boys. Notwithstanding he loved them very much, and went into the adjoining room where they were resting comfortably. The result of his investigation was far from satisfactory. He turned and shifted the youngsters about in bed. One of them began to kick and talk about a basket full of crabs. Mr. Pontellier returned to his wife with the information that Raoul had a high fever and needed looking after. Then he lit a cigar and went and sat near the open door to smoke it. Mrs. Pontellier was quite sure Raoul had no fever. He had gone to bed perfectly well, she said, and nothing had ailed him all day. Mr. Pontellier was too will acquainted with fever symptoms to be mistaken. He assured her the child was consuming at that moment in the next room. He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother' s place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business. He could not be in two places at once making a living for his family on the street, and staying at home to see that no harm befell them. He talked in a monotonous, insistent way. Mrs. Pontellier sprang out of bed and went into the next room. She soon came back and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning her head down on the pillow. She said nothing, and refused to answer her husband when he questioned her. When his cigar was smoked out he went to bed, and in half a minute he was fast asleep. Mrs. Pontellier was by that time thoroughly awake. She began to cry a little, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her peignoir Blowing out the candle, which her husband had left burning, she slipped her bare feet into a pair of satin mules at the foot, of the bed and went out on the porch, where she sat clown in the wicker chair and began to rock gently to and fro. It was then past midnight. The cottages were all dark. A single faint light gleamed out from the hallway of the house. There was no sound abroad except the hoofing of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour It broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night. The tears came so fast to Mrs. Pontellier's eyes that the damp sleeve of her peignoir no longer served to dry them. She was holding the back of her chair with one hand her loose sleeve had slipped almost to tile shoulder of her uplifted arm. Turning, she thrust her face, steaming and wet, into the bend of her arm, and she went on erying there, not earing any longer to dry her face, her eyes, her arms. She could not have told why she was crying. Such experiences as the foregoing were not uncommon in her married life. They seemed never before to have to have weighed much against the abundance of her husband' s kindness and a uniform. devotion which had come to be tacit and self-understood. An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate ill some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled, her whole being with a vague anguish.