The true, logical state of the case never made its appeal to her. She was too much of a romantic, living, as many women do, in a cloudland of hallucination, until a lightning circumstance tears its rent in the vaporous fabric and experience thunders in their ears. Had she consented to the reasoning that she had but left the plying of one trade in exchange for another; had she admitted the fact that she had but abandoned one master for the service of another, there would have been every chance that, if the end should come, she would be able to take up the threads where they had broken off and wring profit from the ultimate position. But no such thought entered her mind. Emancipation was no goal for her ambitions. She sought for chains to gyve about her soul and, in her relationship with Traill, she fondly dreamed that she had found them. If the real aspect of the case had forcibly made its way into her consideration, she would never have accepted the situation, never have laid seal to the compact. All this delirium of reasoning, she showed in the first few moments to Janet when she had returned to London. Down at Kew she spent an evening, delighted, with a justifiable pride, to be seen in one of the dainty frocks that Traill had bought her. "So you're married now, I 'ear," said Mrs. Hewson. "Yes." Sally beamed with her reply, and Janet watched her with questioning eyes. "I hope you're happy." "I couldn't be happier," Sally answered; then she dragged Janet upstairs to the room they had shared together for two years, and throwing her parcels--presents that she had brought from abroad--on to the bed, she twined her arms round Janet's slender neck and covered the thin, drawn face with kisses. One knows the endearments that such an occasion exacts. They come out of a full heart and bear no repetition, for only a full heart can understand them. They swept over Janet, for the moment blinding her in her fondness for this child, full of swift impulse in her gratitude, and drugged with romance in her mind. But once those endearments had been spoken, when once the presents had been divested of their paper wrappings--porcelain representations of the Bambinos from Florence--a marble statue of the Venus de Milo from Pisa--an ornament in mosaic from Rome--when once they had been set up, admired, paid for in kisses of gratitude, then Janet gave words to the questions that had been looking from her eyes. "What sort of a settlement has he made on you?" she asked. The inquiry, notwithstanding the fact that it had been spoken with a gentle voice, tuned to consideration for her feelings, struck the sensitiveness of Sally's mind, whipped the blood to her cheeks. "There is no settlement. Why should there be?" "Why? Well, for every reason in the world, I should think." "There is none, then." "You haven't even suggested it?" "No!"