a fellow human being
whom she disliked as a something, a sort of force, that made for her
unhappiness. She was a menace and a loathing.

"If your mother had asked me that question," she retorted with spirit,
"I should have told her that he was the man who got me safely out of
the theatre after you...." She checked herself. She did not want to
say the unforgivable thing. "You see," she said more quietly, "you had
disappeared...."

"My mother is an old woman," said Derek stiffly. "Naturally I had to
look after her. I called to you to follow."

"Oh, I understand. I'm simply trying to explain what happened. I was
there all alone, and Wally Mason...."

"Wally!" Derek uttered a short laugh, almost a bark. "It got to
Christian names, eh?"

Jill set her teeth.

"I told you I knew him as a child. I always called him Wally then."

"I beg your pardon. I had forgotten."

"He got me out through the pass-door on to the stage and through the
stage-door."

Derek was feeling cheated. He had the uncomfortable sensation that
comes to men who grandly contemplate mountains and see them dwindle to
molehills. The apparently outrageous had shown itself in explanation
nothing so out-of-the-way after all. He seized upon the single point
in Jill's behaviour that still constituted a grievance.

"There was no need for you to go to supper with the man!" Jove-like
wrath had ebbed away to something deplorably like a querulous grumble.
"You should have gone straight home. You must have known how anxious I
would be about you."

"Well, really, Derek, dear! You didn't seem so very anxious! You were
having supper yourself quite cosily."

The human mind is curiously constituted. It is worthy of record that,
despite his mother's obvious disapproval of his engagement, despite
all the occurrences of this dreadful day, it was not till she made
this remark that Derek Underhill first admitted to himself that,
intoxicate his senses as she might, there was a possibility that Jill
Mariner was not the ideal wife for him. The idea came and went more
quickly than breath upon a mirror. It passed, but it had been. There
are men who fear repartee in a wife more keenly than a sword. Derek
was one of these. Like most men of single outlook, whose dignity is
their most precious possession, he winced from an edged tongue.

"My mother was greatly upset," he replied coldly. "I thought a cup of
soup would do her good. And, as for being anxious about you, I
tele