Eustace? Yes. And what of him? He had been told as well as I, I supposed. Rose had never done anything underhand or secretive in her life, and she would have made it a point of honour to let her husband know that she had cut the knot. At this moment he was probably sitting, stunned, in his library, or perhaps with his little Rose in her nursery, and most likely harbouring evil thoughts of me. * * * * * In my dismay and distress I put off dinner for an hour or so, and walked out into the rain to Mrs. O’Gorman’s. It seemed an occasion for the old Irish lady’s pitiless candour. The equally pitiless downpour would, I felt, help too. There are times when one welcomes a storm to fight one’s way through. My thoughts were not idle as I stumbled against the torrents. No aspect of the case did they neglect. I can tell only of what I know, and I have no information as to Ronnie’s hold on Rose after his return and what steps preceded her decision to run off with him. But it is not difficult to realize, at any rate, the temptation. Here was the old friend of her happiest days once more—free and I don’t doubt more than rejoiced to see her again. He had been in strange countries, and probably had carried her image with him through all his wanderings and loneliness. He had never been articulately in love with her when they were youthful together; he had not proposed after that accident—I am sure she would have told me if he had, because she knew that I liked him. When she used to talk to me about her marriage and all those nice boys who were to gallop about the nursery, I had thought naturally of Ronnie as their father. One visualizes a figure on such occasions, and Ronnie sprang into being. But, as it happened, I was wrong. Rose had not thought of Ronnie like this: she had merely liked him, automatically so to speak, and when Eustace came along there was no earlier occupant of her heart to eject. Eustace found it all too easy. But after her marriage so much had happened. And it must never be forgotten that Ronnie compelled interest, all unconsciously maybe, by the force of personality. He was quite ordinary in everything but personality, which in his case was physical more than spiritual. His ready smile, his white teeth, his gaiety, his good humour, his general friendliness and out-for-funnishness won him an easy way into the good graces of the world. He was popular almost universally. Rose, as I have said, had never to my knowledge, or even to my suspicion, been in love with him; nor he with her in any but a superficial degree, even if that; but there was always that intimate experience in Switzerland in the background; and each had since had too much time to think about the past and to speculate upon the might-have-been: Rose in the watches of the night taking stock of her marriage and its disenchantments, and Ronnie in a foreign land sick of a fever.