But no sooner did he open his lips to do so, than a picture of Zoie in all her child-like pleading loveliness, arose to dissuade him. He could imagine his dinner companions all pretending to sympathise with him, while they flayed poor Zoie alive. She would never have another chance to be known as a respectable woman, and compared to most women of his acquaintance, she WAS a respectable woman. True, according to old-fashioned standards, she had been indiscreet, but apparently the present day woman had a standard of her own. Alfred found his eye wandering round the table surveying the wives of his friends. Was there one of them, he wondered, who had never fibbed to her husband, or eaten a simple luncheon unchaperoned by him? Of one thing he was certain, there was not one of them so attractive as Zoie. Might she not be forgiven, to some extent, if her physical charms had made her a source of dangerous temptation to unprincipled scoundrels like the one with whom she had no doubt lunched? Then, too, had she not offered at the moment of his departure to tell him the “real truth”? Might this not have been the one occasion upon which she would have done so? “She seemed so sincere,” he ruminated, “so truly penitent.” Then again, how generous it was of her to persist in writing to him with never an answer from him to encourage her. If she cared for him so little as he had once imagined, why should she wish to keep up even a presence of fondness? Her letters indicated an undying devotion. These were some of the thoughts that were going through Alfred's mind just three months after his departure from Chicago, and all the while his hostess was mentally dubbing him a “dull person.” “What an abstracted man he is!” she said before he was down the front steps. “Is he really so clever in business?” a woman friend inquired. “It's hard to believe, isn't it?” commented a third, and his host apologised for the absent Alfred by saying that he was no doubt worried about a particular business decision that had to be made the next morning. But it was not the responsibility of this business decision that was knotting Alfred's brow, as he walked hurriedly toward the hotel, where he had told his office boy to leave the last mail. This had been the longest interval that Zoie had ever let slip without writing. He recalled that her last letters had hinted at a “slight indisposition.” In fact, she had even mentioned “seeing the doctor”--“Good Heavens!” he thought, “Suppose she were really ill? Who would look after her?” When Alfred reached his rooms, the boy had not yet arrived. He crossed to the library table and took from the drawer all the letters thus far received from Zoie. He read them consecutively. “How could he have been so stupid as not to have realised sooner that her illness--whatever it was--had been gradually creeping upon her from the very first day of his departure?”