She read on it for a good quarter of an hour, but the legal phrases puzzled her, the scantiness of details left her uncertain, the heavy volumes tired her hands to hold. She was no wiser, and a good deal wearier. The door opened behind her. Instinctively she turned round. “Oh, Mortimer, what is a femme sole?” * * * * * She laughed to herself, as the train sped southwards through the night, when she thought of her last sight of her husband as he stood in the doorway, apparently transfixed by her extraordinarily indiscreet question. His abrupt volte face and retreat reminded her that an injured husband is not to be used as an Encyclopædia Britannica. Henceforth she was as a noxious animal, to be got rid of, not argued with. She laughed, and then she cried, but finally her offended dignity won the day, and the train deposited a heroine, rugless, hopeless, comfortless, but still a heroine, every inch of her, on the platform at King’s Cross in the early dawn. She took a room at the Great Northern Hotel and waited in all the day till the calling hour, except for a little excursion to a jeweller’s shop near the station, where she sold her one magnificent diamond ring for about a third of its value. At four o’clock she dressed herself beautifully and took a hansom to Queen Anne’s Mansions, where Egidia lived. She made sure of finding the novelist at home; she had heard her say she was at home on Fridays; if she was not alone she would outstay the other callers. As she drove along she looked at herself critically in the little glass in the corner of the cab. “Talk of the empire of the mind over the body, it is nothing to that of the mind over the complexion!” she said to herself, but was pleased to see that two sleepless nights had only made her eyes larger and her face more interesting. Looks are the sinews of a woman’s war and, though she was not going to quarrel with Egidia but merely give up her lover to her, her prettiness would serve to mark and accentuate her heroism. It was five o’clock when her cab drove under the archway and pulled up at the big door which is the portal to so many homes. Egidia lived very near the top, but she preferred to walk up, she was afraid of the lift. On the threshold of the door which was the novelist’s, as the boy who rang the bell for her informed her, she caught her dress in the mat and stumbled as the maid opened the door. “It means something!” she said to herself. It meant that she was nervous. She was going to do an absurd thing; make a most curiously intimate proposition to a woman she hardly knew! It was like a scene in a novel. If only Egidia would not be too matter-of-fact,--would consent to stay in the picture, as it were! As a novelist she would be apt for irregular situations, and able to enjoy and employ them.