ster, the
towering wardrobes, the capacious, creaking chairs and sofas. Everything
was very clean and old; the dressing-table was stiffly skirted in darned
muslins and near the pin-cushion stood a small, tight nosegay, Mrs.
Bray's cautious welcome to this ambiguous mistress.

"A comfortable old place, isn't it," Bertram had said, looking about,
too; "You'll soon get well and strong here, Amabel." This, Amabel knew,
was said for the benefit of Mrs. Bray who stood, non-committal and
observant just inside the door. She knew, too, that Bertram was
depressed by the gauntness and gaiety of the bedroom and even more
depressed by the maroon leather furniture and the cases of stuffed birds
below, and that he was at once glad to get away from Charlock House and
sorry for her that she should have to be left there, alone with Mrs.
Bray. But to Amabel it was a dream after a nightmare. A strange,
desolate dream, all through those sultry summer days; but a dream shot
through with radiance in the thought of the magnanimity that had spared
and saved her.

And with the coming of the final horror, came the final revelation of
this radiance. She had been at Charlock House for many weeks, and it was
mid-Autumn, when that horror came. She knew that she was to have a child
and that it could not be her husband's child.

With the knowledge her mind seemed unmoored at last; it wavered and
swung in a nightmare blackness deeper than any she had known. In her
physical prostration and mental disarray the thought of suicide was with
her. How face Bertram now,--Bertram with his tenacious hopes? How face
her husband--ever--ever--in the far future? Her disgrace lived and she
was to see it. But, in the swinging chaos, it was that thought that kept
her from frenzy; the thought that it did live; that its life claimed
her; that to it she must atone. She did not love this child that was to
come; she dreaded it; yet the dread was sacred, a burden that she must
bear for its unhappy sake. What did she not owe to it--unfortunate
one--of atonement and devotion?

She gathered all her courage, armed her physical weakness, her wandering
mind, to summon Bertram and to tell him.

She told him in the long drawing-room on a sultry September day, leaning
her arms on the table by which she sat and covering her face.

Bertram said nothing for a long time. He was still boyish enough to feel
any such announcement as embarrassing; and that it should be told him
now, in