The morrow of a catastrophe is perhaps harder to bear than the hour in which it befalls us. The excitement of battling with fate is gone; but the wounds smart and the bruises ache. Physically refreshed by sleep--a sleep happily unbroken by assaults from without or ghostly visitants within the house--Winnie braced her courage to meet the call on it. Her task, not easy, yet was plain. She would not weep for her Godfrey Ledstone; she would try not to think of him, nor to let her thoughts stray back to the early days with him. She would and must think of the other Godfrey, the one in Woburn Square. What woman would weep for such a man as that--except his mother? On him she would fix her thoughts, until she need think no more of either of them. She had to think of herself--of what she had done and of what she was now to do. On the first head she admitted a blunder, but no disgrace--a mistake not of principle or theory, only a mistake in her man; with regard to the second, she must make a decision. Just before she had fairly settled down to this task, she had a visitor. At half-past eleven--early hours for her to be out and about--Mrs. Lenoir appeared. "I was supping at the Carlton grill-room last night," she explained, "with a couple of girls whom I'd taken to the play, and Bob Purnett came in. He drove me back home, and--I don't know if he ought to have--but he told me about some trouble here. So, as I'm an interfering old woman, I came round to see if I could be of any use." Her manner to-day was less stately and more cordial. Also she spoke with a certain frankness. "You see, I know something about this sort of thing, my dear." Winnie, of course, distinguished her 'sort of thing' very broadly from 'the sort of thing' to which Mrs. Lenoir must be assumed to refer, but she made no secret of the state of the case or of her own attitude towards it. "I accept it absolutely, but I'm bitterly hurt by the way it was done." "Oh, you can put it that way, my dear; but you're human like the rest of us, and, of course, you hate having him taken away from you. Now shall I try what I can do?" "Not for the world! Not a word, nor a sign! It's my mistake, and I stand by it. If he came back, it would never be the same thing. It was beautiful; it would be shameful now." Mrs. Lenoir smiled doubtfully; she had an imperfect understanding of the mode of thought. "Very well, that's settled. And, for my part, I think you're well rid of him. A weak creature! Let him marry a Bloomsbury girl, and I hope she'll keep him in fine order. But what are you going to do?" "I don't quite know. Stephen and Tora would let me go back to Shaylor's Patch for as long as I liked." "Oh, Shaylor's Patch! To talk about it all, over and over again!" A note of impatience in her friend's voice was amusingly evident to Winnie. "You mean the less I talk about it, the better?" she asked, smiling.