re?'

'She came to assert her rights,' said Phyllis, with a biting
indignation. 'She came to warn us that she was setting the law in
motion, and that she would drag Madge's name--you hear? Madge's
name--through the mud of the Divorce Court; and only this morning I
loved you, and respected you, and believed in you.'

'I must see Madge,' said Paul.

'You shall not!' she cried, flashing to the door, and setting her back
against it.

But the door was opened from without, and Madge was here. Paul opened
his arms to her, and she laid her pale face against his breast.

'I have feared it always,' she said, 'and it has come at last. My poor,
poor Paul 'how you must have suffered!'

'Your poor, poor Paul,' said Phyllis, in a voice of bitterest disdain,
'is a very fitting object for your pity. My personal recommendation is
that your poor Paul should drown himself.'

'You don't understand, dear,' Madge answered her--' you don't
understand. Paul has done me no wrong. We did not take you into our
confidence, because you were too young; but there has been no disguise
among the rest of us. I knew of this before Paul and I resolved to spend
our lives together. Mother knew it; George knew it; you know it now,
dear. Will it part us, Bill?'

The girl's face changed from angry scorn to pure bewilderment, and then
again to pity.

'Come here, Madge,' she cried, opening her arms wide, and speaking with
a sobbing voice; 'come here.'

She hugged her sister fiercely, and cried over her.

'I can understand,' she said--'I can understand.' She repeated the words
again and again. 'It isn't a pretty thing to have to face; but it's your
trouble, darling, and we must stick together. As for me,' she added,
with a new outbreak of tears, which a laugh made half hysteric, 'I shall
stick like wax.'

Annette's threat was no _brutum fulmen_, as the society newspapers soon
began to show. Paragraphs appeared here and there indicating that the
unprosperous matrimonial affairs of a popular playwright would shortly
excite the interest of the public; and one day Paul, driving along
the Strand, and finding his cab momentarily arrested by a block in the
traffic, was frozen to the marrow by the sight of a newspaper placard
which by way of sole contents bore the words, 'Who is the real Mrs.
Armstrong? Divorce proceedings instituted against a famous playwright.'

At first his thought was: 'Some enemy has done this;' but he knew the
journal and most of th