as
really fond of the boy, I couldn't escape the impression that she was
edging out on very thin ice. It was, I think, only the silent misery
in her half-averted face which kept me from inquiring if she hadn't
rather made it a family affair. But that, second thought promptly told
me, would seem too much like striking the fallen. And we both seemed
to feel, thereafter, that silence was best.

Practically nothing passed between us, in fact, until we reached the
station. I could see that she was dreading the ordeal of saying
good-by. That unnamed sixth sense peculiar to cab-drivers and waiters
and married women told me that every moment on the bald little
platform was being a torture to her. As the big engine came lumbering
up to a standstill she gave me one quick and searching look. It was a
look I shall never forget. For, in it was a question and something
more than a question. An unworded appeal was there, and also an
unworded protest. It got past my outposts of reason, in some way. It
came to me in my bitterness like the smell of lilacs into a sick-room.
I couldn't be cruel to that poor crushed outcast who had suffered
quite as much from the whole ignoble affair as I had suffered. I
suddenly held out my hand to her, and she took it, with that hungry
questioning look still on her face.

"It's all right," I started to say. But her head suddenly went down
between her hunched-up shoulders. Her body began to shake and tears
gushed from her eyes. I had to help her to the car steps.

"It was all my fault," she said in a strangled voice, between her
helpless little sobs.

It was brave of her, of course, and she meant it for the best. But I
wish she hadn't said it. Instead of making everything easier for me,
as she intended, she only made it harder. She left me disturbingly
conscious of ghostly heroisms which transposed what I had tried to
regard as essentially ignoble into some higher and purer key. And she
made it harder for me to look at my husband, when I got home, with a
calm and collected eye. I felt suspiciously like Lady Macbeth after
the second murder. I felt that we were fellow-sharers of a guilty
secret it would never do to drag too often into the light of
every-day life.

But it will no more stay under cover, I find, than a dab-chick will
stay under water. It bobs up in the most unexpected places, as it did
last night, when Dinkie publicly proclaimed that he was going to marry
his Mummy when he got big.

"I