He springs from his seat and paces furiously up and down the length of the room, the veins standing out on his forehead like whip-cords. He forgets that it is almost morning, forgets that he is tired. He goes straight to his wife's room. He turns the knob, but he can not enter for the door is locked. He knocks, but receives no answer, and turning away, he enters his own apartment again, to wait another hour. Up and down the floor he walks. Can what he has read be true? Has the girl whom he has married, against his will, as it were, made a laughing-stock of him in the eyes of every man and woman in Newport? _Dared_ she do it? He goes out into the hall once more, and is just in time to see his wife's French maid returning from breakfast. He pushes past the girl, and strides into the inner apartment. Sally is sitting by the window in a pale-blue silk wrapper wonderfully trimmed with billows of rare lace, baby blue ribbons and jeweled buckles, her yellow hair falling down over her shoulders in a rippling mass of tangled curls. Jay Gardiner does not stop to admire the pretty picture she makes, but steps across the floor to where she sits. "Mrs. Gardiner," he cries, hoarsely, "if you have the time to listen to me, I should like a few words with you here and now." Sally's guilty heart leaps up into her throat. How much has he discovered of what happened last night? Does he know all? He is standing before her with flushed face and flashing eyes. She cowers from him, and if guilt was ever stamped on a woman's face, it is stamped on hers at that instant. If her life had depended upon it, she could not have uttered a word. "Read that!" he cried, thrusting the open letter into her hand--"read that, and answer me, are those charges false or true?" For an instant her face had blanched white as death, but in the next she had recovered something of her usual bravado and daring. That heavy hand upon her shoulder seemed to give her new life. She took in the contents of the letter at a single glance, and then she sprung from her seat and faced him defiantly. Oh, how terribly white and stern his face had grown since he had entered that room. "Did you hear the question I put to you, Mrs. Gardiner?" he cried, hoarsely, his temper and his suspicions fairly aroused at Sally's expression. The truth of the words in the anonymous letter is slowly forcing itself upon him. If ever a woman looked guilty, _she_ did at that moment. She stands trembling before him, her eyes fixed upon the floor, her figure drooping, her hands tightly clasped. "Well?" he says, sharply; and she realizes that there is no mercy in that tone; he will be pitiless, hard as marble. "It ought never to have been," she said, as if speaking to herself. "I wish I could undo it." "You wish you could undo what?" asked her husband, sternly. "Our marriage. It was all a mistake--all a mistake," she faltered.