“But I know you,” returned the other, with a little fierce chuckle of triumph. “I know why you have come here to-night. You ladies give yourself such airs--you are not a bit better than girls like me. If everybody had their rights, I ought to be Mrs. Kinsman. See!” Mrs. Conifer did see. The whole hideous position was perfectly clear to her, without another word. You won’t believe me, of course, but she wasn’t a wicked woman. She had simply drifted, like any other idle young woman might. There had been a fascination about Kinsman, with his queerly furnished rooms, his romantic airs of art-worship, sympathy, and so on. She had regarded herself as misunderstood and was inclined to be plaintively melancholy about Conifer’s obtuseness. Kinsman had been an affinity. She got the insidious flavor of the Inn. There had been nothing vulgar or wicked about the affair. It had only been delicious, piquant, dangerous--like a leaf torn out of the “Decameron.” Sophia Dominy brought everything up to date, brought terrifying visions of the Divorce Court. Mrs. Conifer was a faithful wife again, in every thought, directly she looked into those blazing black eyes and understood. She whisked round and rustled swiftly in her skirts of silk across the square, getting out at the Holborn end and plunging into the stream of people on the pavement flowing westward. So soon as the first tightness was out of her throat and the first desperate trembling had left her limbs she hailed a hansom, telling the man to stop at the corner of Russell Square. She fell back quivering on the seat and shut her eyes, but opened them again directly because the face of Sophia rose before her--triumphant, grinning, pale with chalk, and hidden to the thick brows with a coarse fuzz of hair. She went tottering up her own doorsteps. As she slipped along the hall, and past the study door, Conifer called out: “Is that you, Freda?” “Yes, it is I.” “Come in.” She stepped over the threshold and stood in the warm room, her pale head hanging and her half-shut eyes filled with dread. She forced herself to look up at last and to stammer out: “We drove down to Terry’s Theater, Mrs. Hart and I. But the house was full--so--so we drove back. That is all--really.” Conifer was sitting over the big table as usual, and as usual it was strewn with papers. But the double knot of anxiety was untied from above his eyes and the packets of paper were pushed back. There was a new tenderness on his face, or, rather, the revival of on old one. “I’m glad you came back,” he said. “I’ve got time to talk to you to-night, darling. I shall have time to take you about again myself. I’ve been awfully worried lately about business--you wouldn’t understand, it would only bother you. But I was afraid once that it meant ruin. I’ve been in a very tight place. But it’s all right now.” He set back his shoulders and sighed, as if he threw off at that moment the burden of months.