but too comfortable to move.

But a cold hand was laid on Joan's heart, and all that rang in her
brain were the words that Alice had used,--"white face and red lips and
hair that came out of a bottle.... Don't YOU be the one to turn his
armor into common broadcloth."

And for a moment she stood, looking from Marty to the girl and back to
Marty, like one struck dumb, like one who draws up at the very lip of a
chasm.... And in that cruel and terrible minute her heart seemed to
break and die. Marty, Marty in broadcloth, and she had put it in his
hands. She had turned him away from her room and lost him. There's not
one thing that any of us can do or say that doesn't react on some one
else to hurt or bless.

With a little gasp, the sense of all this going home to her, Tootles
scrambled awkwardly off the settee, dropping a book and a handkerchief.
This, then, this beautiful girl who belonged to a quarter of life of
which she had sometimes met the men but never the women, was Martin's
wife--the wife of the man whom she loved to adoration.

"Why, then, you're--you're Mrs. Gray," she stammered, her impertinence
gone, her hail-fellow-well-met manner blown like a bubble.

Catching sight of the message, "We count it death to falter not to
die," Joan summoned her pride, put up her chin and gave a curious
little bow. "Forgive me," she said, "I'm trespassing," and not daring
to look at Marty, turned and went out. She heard him call her name, saw
his sturdy shadow fall across the yellow patch, choked back a sob,
started running, and stumbled away and away, with the blood from her
heart bespattering the grasses and the wild flowers, and the fairies
whimpering at her heels,--and, at last, climbing back into the room
that knew and loved and understood, threw herself down on its bosom in
a great agony of grief.

"Be kind to me, old room, be kind to me. It's Joan-all-alone,--all
alone."

PART THREE

THE GREAT EMOTION

I

Mrs. Alan Hosack, bearing a more than ever remarkable resemblance to
those ship's figureheads that are still to be seen in the corners of
old lumber yards, led the way out to the sun porch. Her lavish charms,
her beaming manner, her clear blue eye, milky complexion, reddish hair,
and the large bobbles and beads with which she insisted upon decorating
herself made Howard Cannon's nickname of Cornucopia exquisitely right.
She was followed by Mrs. Cooper Jekyll and a man servant, whose arms
were full