For I did not understand. I was married to him, much, much more married than I had ever been to Tommy Bettersworth, and it wasn't in me to understand how any man can take a woman as he had taken me, and not feel himself more bound than ever church and state could bind him. It was ten months since I had seen him, but that while my body still ached with the memory of him, he could have given himself to another woman, was an unbelievable offence. There are days yet when I do not believe it. There was nothing any of my friends could do for me. I had the sense to see that and did not trouble them. Sarah, who was the only one who might have comforted me out of her own experience, was all taken up with her husband's declining health. Mr. Lawrence died the next winter, and by that time my wound had got past the imperative need of speech. Effie was expecting another baby and wasn't to be thought of, so I turned at last, when the first sharp anguish was past, to Mark Eversley. He in all America stood for that high identification of his work with the source of power, that it is the private study of all my days to reach. I repaired to him as did Christians of old to favoured altars. That I did so return for comfort to that Distributer of Gifts by whose very mark on me I was set apart from the happier destiny, was evidence to me, the only evidence I could have at the time, that I had not been utterly mistaken in the choice I had made before I I knew all that the choice involved. Eversley and his wife were Christian Scientists, and, though they did not make me of their opinion, I owe them much in the way of practice and example that keeps me still within the circle of communicating fire. I re-established, never to be broken off again, practical intercourse with the Friends of the Soul of Man. I learned to apply directly for the things I had supposed came only by loving, and I found that they came abundantly. I grew in time even, to think of Helmeth without bitterness. What I was brought to see, over and above the wish to provide a home for his children, must have been at work in him, was much the same thing that had driven me to my work; the very need of me must have hurried him into the relief of being loved. It was the only way which his purblind male instinct pointed him, to find an outlet for what goes from me over the footlights night by night. For a man, to be loved is of the greatest importance, but with women it is loving that is the fructifying act.