To make him a good wife I had choked back everything I had ever felt for Larry Strangways; I had submitted to all the Brokenshire repressions; I had made myself humble and small before Hugh and his father, and accepted the status of a Libby Jaynes. My heart cried out like any other woman's heart--it cried out for my country in the hour of its stress; it cried out for my home in what I tried to make the hour of my happiness; when it caught me unawares it cried out for the man I loved. But all this I mastered as our Canadian men were mastering their longings and regrets on saying their good-bys. What was to be done was to be done, and done willingly. Willingly I meant to marry Hugh, not because he was the man I would have chosen before all others, but because, when no one else in the world was giving me a thought, he had had the astonishing goodness to choose me. And now-- With Mrs. Brokenshire the situation was different. She believed I was in love with Hugh and that the others were doing me a wrong. Moreover, she informed me one day that I was making my way in Newport. People who noticed me once noticed me again. The men beside whom I sat at the occasional lunches and dinners I attended often spoke of me to the hostess on going away, and there could be no better sign than that. They said that, though I "wasn't long on looks," I had ideas and knew how to express them. She ventured to hope that this kindly opinion might, in the end, soften Mr. Brokenshire. "Do you mean that he isn't softened as it is?" She answered, indirectly: "He's not accustomed to be forced--and he feels I've forced him." It was her first reference to what she had done for Hugh and me. In its way it gave me permission to say: "But isn't it a question of the _quid pro quo_? If you granted him something for something he granted you in return--" But the expression on her face forbade my going on. I have never seen such a parting to human lips, or so haunting, so lost a look in human eyes. It told me everything. It was a confession of all the things she never could have said. "Better is it," says the Book of Ecclesiastes, "that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay." She had vowed and not paid. She had got her price and hadn't fulfilled her bargain. She couldn't; she never would. It was beyond her. The big moneyed man who at that minute was helping to finance a good part of Europe, who was a power not only in a city or a country, but the world, had been tricked by a woman; and I in my poor little person was the symbol of his discomfiture.