you
never come back?"

She looked at him earnestly, and nodded. "Yes," she said, "I was afraid
you would ask that; and yet I am glad, for it forces me to make
confession, and I shall feel better to get it over.... Ruth loves me
still, you see; but, of course, her husband comes first, and after her
husband--if not sometimes before him--her children. That is as it
should be, of course."

"Of course," the Commandant echoed.

"And of course I foresaw it. Remember, please, that I foresaw it before
ever there was a question of young Tregarthen; so that my jealousy, if
you are going to laugh at it, had nothing to do----"

"I am not in the least inclined to laugh."

"Thank you. We were not as ordinary sisters, you see, and ... and there
is another thing I must tell you," she went on with a brisk change of
tone. "Though Ruth and I have always written regularly, there is one
thing I have always kept hidden from her--I mean my success, as you
will call it. At first this wasn't deliberate at all.... A great chance
came to me, a chance so good that I could hardly believe--yes, so
incredible even to me, that I dared not talk of it, but walked humbly,
and taught myself to think of it as a dream from which I must awake,
and awake to find people laughing at my hopes. I hid it even from
Ruth.... Afterwards, when the dream had become a certainty, it seemed
yet harder to tell her. I had concealed so much, and to tell her now
seemed like triumphing over her--so full her letters were of simple
things and of her happiness in them. I was afraid my news would overawe
her, would change her in some way; that she would think me some grand
person, and not the sister to whom she had told all her mind--not, you
must understand, that Ruth could be envious if she tried. But have you
never seen how, when a man grows rich or powerful suddenly, his old
friends, the best of them, draw away from him, not in envy at all, but
just because they feel he has been taken from them?"

"Yes," said the Commandant, "I have seen such cases."

"And I wanted still to be Vazzy to her--even though I must come after
husband and children."

"She knows, then, as little about your--your success--or almost as
little, as I do?" asked the Commandant, quaintly.

Vashti broke into a gay little laugh. "But I am going to tell her now,"
she answered, rising--"and that is where I want you to help me. She has
no idea at all that I am here, and I want--that is my little plan--