While I was getting it on the table I recalled Miss Rathbone. "What," I said, "has she been doing to get herself talked about?" Suddenly there whipped out on his face the counterpart of the flinching which I had noted in the dressmaker. "Who said she had been talked about? What have they been telling you? A pack of lying old cats!" "So she _has_ been talked about?" I put down a pile of plates the better to account to myself for his excitement. "I might have known somebody would get at you. Why can't they come to me." "Tommy! Has Miss Rathbone been talked about with _you_? Oh, my dear!" I meant it for commiseration. Tommy went sullen all at once. "I don't want to talk about it. I won't talk about it!" "You needn't. And as for what the others say, you don't suppose I am going to believe it?" He turned visibly sick at the assurance. "I'll tell you about it after supper," he protested. "I meant to tell you." I kept my mind turned deliberately away from the subject until it was night and I heard the last tardy customer depart, then the shutters go up, and after a considerable interval my husband's foot upon the stairs. I hope I have made you understand how good he was, with what simple sort of goodness, not meant to stand the strain of the complexity in which he found himself. He wanted desperately to get out of it, to get in touch again with straight and simple lines of living. As he stood before me then his face was streaked red and white with the stress of the situation, like a man after a great bodily exertion. I was moved suddenly to spare him--after all what was the village dressmaker to us? Tommy flared out at me. "She is as good as you are ... she's as pure ... as kind-hearted. It's as much your fault as anybody's. You were away; you were always away." His voice trailed out into extenuation. There fell a long pause in which several things became clear to me. "Tell me," I said at last. Tommy sat down on the red plush couch. He had taken off his coat downstairs, for the evening was warm. There was pink in his necktie and the freckles stood out across his nose. I was taken with a wild sense of the ridiculous. Miss Rathbone, I knew, was six years my husband's senior. "I went there a good deal last winter," he began. "I never meant any harm ... my business partner ... it was lonesome here. Of course I ought to have known people would talk. Nobody told me. She was brave, she bore it a long time, and then I saw that something was the matter. I didn't know until she told me, how fond of her I was----" "Tommy, Tommy!" Strangely, it was I crying out. "Fond of her? Fond of _her_?"