ammered and his voice broke, and he covered his face with his
hands.

And instantly, with the maternal spirit that goes with all true womanly
love ablaze in her heart, Alice went to him and put her arms about his
neck and drew his head down on her shoulder.

And he left it there, with tears.

A little later they sat down again side by side, holding hands.

As Hosack had told himself, and Gilbert had just said, things seemed to
be coming to a head. At that moment Tootles was strung up to play her
last card, Joan was being driven back by Harry from the cottage of
"Mrs. Gray" and Martin, becalmed on the water, with an empty pipe
between his teeth, was thinking about Joan.

Palgrave was comforted. The making of his confession was like having an
abscess lanced. In his weakness, in his complete abandonment of
affectation, he had never been so much of a man.

There was not to Alice, who had vision and sympathy, anything either
strange or perverse in the fact that Gilbert had told his story and was
not ashamed. Love had been and would remain the one big thing in her
own life, the only thing that mattered, and so she could understand,
even as she suffered, what this Great Emotion meant to Gilbert. She
adopted his words in thinking it all over. They appealed to her as
being exactly right.

She too was comforted, because she saw a chance that Gilbert, with the
aid of the utmost tact and the most tender affection, might be drawn
back to her and mended. She almost used Hosack's caustic expression
"rescued." The word came into her mind but was instantly discarded
because it was obvious that Joan, however impishly she had played with
Gilbert, was unaffected. Angry as it made her to know that any girl
could see in Gilbert merely a man with whom to fool she was supremely
thankful that the complication was not as tragic as it might have been.
So long as Joan held out, the ruin of her marriage was incomplete.
Hope, therefore, gleamed like a distant light. Gilbert had gone back to
youth. It seemed to her that she had better treat him as though he were
very young and hurt.

"Dearest," she said, "I'm going to take you away."

"Are you, Alice?"

"Yes. We will go on the yacht, and you shall read and sleep and get
your strength back."

He gave a queer laugh. "You talk like a mother," he said, with a catch
in his voice.

She went forward and kissed him passionately.

"I love you like a mother as well as a wife, my man," she whis