"It's too late." "No, no!" "It's too late. I can't cut myself off from him. Jean!" Her voice quavered to shrill intensity. "Jean! Don't you--don't you _see_!" Jean saw and was answered, and her womanhood bade her sweep the weakling to her breast. "I've kept it from him," wept Amy. "He hates children about. I did not dare tell him." "I dare," cried Jean, like a trumpet-call. "And I will." Her assurance quieted the girl like an anodyne, and presently she slept. Sundown, twilight, and night succeeded. The watcher's muscles grew cramped, but whenever she sought to loose the sleeper's clasp, Amy whimpered like a feverish child, and so she sat compassionately on aiding nature's healing work. Meanwhile she tried to frame her appeal to the drummer. How or when she should reach him she knew not; Amy must bring about a meeting. She did not believe that he had definitely deserted his victim. His sample-cases in the hall, his innumerable pipes, his clothing strewn about the bedroom, all argued a return. She longed that he might come now while her wrath burned hottest and she might scorch him to a sense of his infamy. It could be done. She was confident that she could stir him somehow. Surely, he was not all beast. Somewhere underneath the selfish hide lurked a torpid microscopic soul, some germ of pity, some spark of manhood. Then Amy awoke, refreshed, heartened, yet still spineless, clinging, and dependent; and Jean threw herself into the task of cheering this mockery of a home. She made Amy bathe her dreadful eyes, arrange her hair, don a dress the drummer liked; and then set her ordering the neglected flat, while she herself conjured up a meal from the unpromising materials which a search of the larder disclosed. The little kitchen was haunted with ghosts of her other life. The dentist's astonishing ice-cream freezer and the patent dish-washer stared her in the face, and her hunt for the tea-canister revealed the kit of tools she had bought to surprise him. Not a utensil hung here which was not of their choosing. And so it was with the other rooms. When she came to lay the cloth, its grape-vine pattern greeted her like a forgotten acquaintance; the colonial sideboard and the massive table, as formerly, united to resist invasion of their tiny stronghold. The silver candelabra, restored to the giver, still flanked Grimes's Louis XV clock upon the mantelpiece; the galaxy of American poets hung where she had appointed. The Jean who had done these things, lived this existence, was a distant, shadowy personality, and the feat of making her intelligible to another seemed more than ever impossible. She rejoiced that she had locked this chapter from Craig. Her present self was her real self, the Jean he idealized, the real Jean. The belated supper braced Amy's mood. She became apologetic for the drummer and sanguine of the future.