"When I saw I'd drawn a blank in Jack Holton, it really didn't bother me so much as you might think. Of course, I was worried and humiliated at times; and there were days when I went into the telegraph office and went through the motions of sending for you to come and fish me out of my troubles. I tore up half a dozen of those messages, so you never heard me squeal; and then I began playing my own game in my own way. I hung a smile on the door, so to speak, and did my suffering inside. For ten years Jack never knew anything about me--the real me. For a long time I couldn't quite come to the point of shaking him, and he couldn't shake me,--he couldn't without starving"; and she smiled the ghost of a grim little smile. "I suppose I wasn't exactly in a position to insist on a husband's fidelity, but when he began to be a filthy nuisance I got rid of him. Just before I went abroad this last time I divorced him, and gave him enough to keep him running for a while. My story in a nutshell is this," and she touched her fingers lightly as she epitomized her personal history: "married at eighteen, to a gentleman; a mother at twenty; at twenty-three, ran off with a blackguard; married him in due course to satisfy the _convenances_. Not forty yet and divorced twice! And here I am, tolerably cheerful and not so much the worse for wear." She waited for him to say something; but there appeared to be little for Amzi to say. "I guess we all do the best we can, Lois. You don't have to talk to me about those things. I'm glad you're back; that's all." He showed his embarrassment, shifting from one foot to the other, and rubbing his hand nervously across his head. "Amzi, you're the best man in the world, and I didn't come back here to be a nuisance to you. I can sleep here and run off on the early train--I looked it up before I came. But I thought I'd like to see the house--and you in it--once more. It's a big world, and there are plenty of places to go. There's a lot of Europe I haven't seen yet, and I like it over there. I have some good friends in Dresden, and I promised them to come back. So don't feel that I'm on your hands. I'm not! I can clear out in the morning and nobody need know that I've been here." He walked up to her and laid his hands on her shoulders. He gasped at her suggestion of immediate flight. He had not known how much she meant to him; and oh, she was so like Phil! It was Phil who had danced in his mind while she summarized her life; it was the Phil she did not know--had never known--and for whom, astonishingly, she had not asked beyond her casual inquiry as to the girl's whereabouts. Nothing was clear in his mind save that Lois must see and know Phil. "I want you to stay, Lois; you've got to stay. And everything's going to be all right."