I have my theory, of course. Almost all my knowledge of Mrs. Harter is theoretical. I think that Bill had asked her for a decision and that she was deferring it until the next day, until they went “up Loman Hill to the crossroads” once more. I always imagine that, in spite of Harter, and certainly in spite of the people who looked at them so often, and with so much disapproval, they deliberately forgot about the future for that one evening. Both of them must have realized that a turning point had been reached. Harter had come home, he had made it perfectly clear that in no circumstances would he give his wife her freedom, and she had, I afterwards learned, made it equally clear that, whether she went away with Bill or not, she had no intention of returning to her husband again. It was Bill Patch, with his strange mixture of a belief in God and a strong sense of the “unsportingness” of adultery, who saw the necessity for a decision. To Mrs. Harter I am quite certain that the issue would have been a simple one. All her life she had gone for what she wanted with a singular and unusual freedom of aim, in so far as the opinion of other people was always a matter of complete and genuine indifference to her. Neither by education nor by temperament was she a woman of ideals, and it seems to me the measure of her regard for Bill Patch that she was prepared to let his be a determining factor in their future. They did not return to the ballroom again until the last dance of the evening was being played. It is part of the incongruity that was so marked a feature of the whole affair that for that last dance the players chose to repeat the “sensational fox-trot” with which the evening had begun--that loud, swaggering, jerky abomination that yet held its third-rate appeal: “Why--did--I kiss that girl-- Why, oh! why, oh! why?” And Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter danced it together. I watched them all the while this time almost as Mrs. Kendal herself might have done, and Mrs. Harter’s eyes were shining like a girl’s, and I remembered Martyn Ambrey and his--“_That_ woman hard?” Bill’s young face was that of a boy in love until one looked at it very closely, and then it was that of a man who has found security. I have always had a fancy that Bill knew that evening which way Diamond Harter would eventually decide, but that he had consciously put the knowledge away from him, and was simply, as he had once said to Nancy Fazackerly, “so extraordinarily happy, in spite of it all.” * * * * * It was after three o’clock when the Kendals, who are generally the last to leave any entertainment, prepared to go home. “I shall enjoy a drive in the moonlight,” said Mumma, pleasantly sentimental. “Don’t you think, Puppa dear, that a drive in the moonlight will be too delightful? It will remind us of our honeymoon days,” said Mumma, smiling delightfully. Then a _contretemps_ arose.