Hopkinsville Kentuckian., 1913-07-22
TWO FAILURES
By FREDERICK FEM.

habit was probably right, and herein
lies the reason why the percentage
Of marriages among widows is so
high. Once you have been accus-
NJ to the companionship of the
AoAite sex it is difficult to do with
out il.
No one expected that Geoffry
Hamilton would marry again when
Agatha died but he did, and this is
how it came to pass, and the sequel.
For fifteen years the Hamiltons
we're almost ideally happy, and then
the subtle element Of jealousy crept
into their relations. 1t was not that
he flirted, but with growth Of pop
ularity-he was a novelist of some
note-he attracted attention, and
many women found him interesting.
The little rift of suspicion once
started developed amazingly quickly,
until mutual relations became impos-
sible. Agatha, being miserable, was
constitutionally unable to refrain
from making Geoffry equally miser-
able, and then he became doubly so
because constant succession Of
scenes entirely prevented him doing
any good work.
As a consequence he took to find
mzAFelief outside his home.
Mrfore long matters reached
stage in which Agatha was never
happy unless making herself miser-
able, if the paradox may be excused,
by searching through her husbands
papers and documents in the hope of
finding proofs of his perfdy.
She succeeded in making the pair
of them unutterably miserable, and
then Hamilton took the matter into
his own hands and decided that
something must be done.
There were no grounds for a di-
vorce, so that most disastrous of all
matrimonial arrangements, separa-
ton, was decided upon. In this case
neither party did form any new at
tachment. Strange as it may seem,
at the back of all their chickering's
they still cared for one another deep
ly, and Agatha never ceased to cry
for the man who for fifteen years
had been all in all to her, while,
though Geoffry found peace and a
new energy for work, always, at the
back of his mind, was a gnawing
anslsT as TO what was happening to
thttISynan who once meant so much
to him.
So matters drifted on until Aga
tha died-lonely, miserable, heart
broken-and her husband never real
ly got over it, as the sequel shows.
That was Hamilton's first mar
riage, and you might have thought
that he would not have been in a
very great hurry to make another
experiment, but, as a matter of fact,
it was only very short time before
he was tied up once more, and how
this came about was curious.
The thought of marrying again
had not occurred to him, but he was
in that unstrung, nervous state when
any clever woman with a knowledge
of human weakness can upset a
mans moral balance, and the woman
who did this was Evelyn Richards.
She was a widow, and slight ac-
quaintance of some years standing,
but not woman with whom Hamil-
ton had ever been on terms of the
slightest intimacy.
M chance meeting, though, one
day afforded him some pleasure, for
she was undeniably attractive, and
the sequel to this meeting was an
arrangement to go to theater the
following evening. They went and
Hamilton found rest and forgetful-
ness.
After the piece they adjourned tc
her fiat for supper and afterward sal
for an hour smoking and talking Of
purely ordinary things.
Then, how it happened the man
never quite knew, but suddenly tbs
woman rose from where she was sit
ting, and, coming over to him as he
stood by the fire preparatory to TAX
ing his leave, put her hands ON his
shoulders and kissed him. Before
he quite knew what he was doing he
had taken her in his arms and kissed