and I faced each other, it was pity
instead of anger that stirred my heart. The girl was inexpressibly
wan, her beauty only a worn shadow of its former glory. But there was
the old flash of defiant hatred in her eyes as she looked at me.

"Please don't flatter yourself that I have come here for your sake,"
she said, with her old smooth insolence. "But this girl here"--she
indicated Katherine--"took care of me before she knew who I was. She
just about saved my life and reason, too, when there was nobody else
to care a whit whether I lived or died. Even my sister's gone back on
me. So when I saw how much it meant to her to find out the truth about
your precious husband, I promised her I'd come and tell you the little
I knew."

She drew a long breath, and went on.

"In the first place, I didn't go to San Francisco with Dicky Graham,
although I'm glad if my little trick made you think so for awhile. I
didn't go anywhere with him except into a cafe for a few minutes, the
day he left New York. It was just after he got back from Marvin, and
he was pouring drinks into himself so fast that he was pretty hazy
about what had happened, but I made a pretty shrewd guess as to his
trouble."

She turned to me, and I saw with amazement that contempt for me was
written on her face.

"You!" she snarled, "with your innocent face, and your high and mighty
airs, you must have been up to something pretty disgraceful, to
have your husband feel the way he did that day he started for San
Francisco! He had to go out to Marvin unexpectedly that morning,
almost as soon as he had arrived in the city. What or who he found
there, you know best."

"Stop!" said Lillian authoritatively, and for a long minute the two
women faced each other, Grace Draper defiant, Lillian, with all the
compelling, almost hypnotic power that is hers when she chooses to
exercise it.

The accusation which the girl had hurled at me stunned me as
effectually as an actual missile from her hand would have done. What
did she mean? And then, before my dazed brain could work itself back
through the mazes of memory, there came the whir of a taxi in the
street, an imperative ring of the bell, a tramp of masculine footsteps
in the hall, and then--my husband's arms were around me, his lips
murmuring disjointed, incoherent sentences against my cheek.

"Madge! Madge! little sweetheart!--no right to ask
forgiveness--deserve to lose you forever for my doubt of you--been
through