Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: for the money but for the occupation and interest it would give her idle days, that Dan could not refuse his consent; and it was not his way to yield grudgingly. But Anna remembered the strength with which, before they married, he had objected to her singing in public; and she thought bitterly that he had grown careless of her. He was still in many ways a puzzle to her; a puzzle that grew less easy to solve, the more she brooded on it. They had been married but six months and for two of these they had been separated. The apparent ease with which he had adjusted himself to living without her, she felt as an injury. He was full of affection for her still -- or his letters were -- but they were not the letters of an unhappy man. He had left the place in which he had lived eight years without a regret for it, so far as she could see. He had broken whatever ties of friendship he had, with perfect carelessness. She who needed, to be happy or at ease, a network of other lives connected with her own, a frame of material interests surrounding her, could not comprehend the solitary spirit who apparently needed nothing except his work and his dreams of the future -- dreams in which, not herself, but work again, accomplishment, success, played, she thought, the main part. But, though she might be ill-used, Anna was resolved to be blameless. She could not write freely about De Ronde to Dan, and she disliked to feel that she was concealing anything from him -- except, indeed, her thoughts of him. Finally an event of happy augury to her family helped her to the step she felt obliged to take. Mr. Quartermain received a call from a prosperous Unitarian church in Oakland, with the offer of a liberal salary. A book of his sermons which had been published by subscription a year ago befor...