gent of telephones nor the
most intimate of callers were to be admitted. They drank their
coffee in silence, and then Jeannie got up.

"I have got to tell you, Alice," she said, "about that which only
yesterday I said I hoped I should never be obliged to speak of to
anybody. I suppose the envious Fates heard me; certainly the words were
scarcely out of my mouth before the necessity arose. What I have got to
tell you about is that which all last autumn was harder for me to get
over, I think, than all that I had been through myself. Only yesterday I
believed it to be all dead; I believed it to be at most a memory from
which time had already taken the bitterness. But I was completely and
signally wrong. It is dead no longer; it is terribly alive, for it has
had a resurrection which would convert a Sadducee. It is connected with
the reason why Daisy can never marry Tom Lindfield. It is more than
connected with it; it is the reason itself."

Jeannie had begun to speak standing by the fireplace and facing the full
light of the window, but here she moved, and wheeling a chair with its
back to the light, sat down in it. She wanted to be a voice and no
more--a mere chronicle of a few hard, dry, irrevocable facts, things
that had happened, and could not be altered or softened. There was no
comment, no interpretation to be made. She had just to utter them; Alice
Nottingham had just to hear them.

"You may have to give me time, my dear," she said, "for it will be as
much as I can do, I am afraid, just to get through with the telling of
it. Yes, I am already frightening you, I know. I do that on purpose,
because I want to prepare you for a story that must shock and disturb
you very much. I wondered last night whether I could manage without
telling you, whether I could spare your hearing it all, but I find I
can't. I can't act alone in this, on my own responsibility. Perhaps you
may be able to think of some plan which will make mine unnecessary, and
I would give a great deal for that to happen. But some plan must be made
and carried out. Something has to be done."

She covered her face with her hands for a moment, then took them away,
and spoke, slowly and carefully, so that there might be no need for
further explanation of what she said.

"Of course you remember Diana, Daisy's sister," she said, "though
you would remember her more as a name than as a person, for I think
you never knew her at all well. She married very early, yo