“Why didn’t he come to me, himself?” said I. “Why did he send you?” She looked at me--a steady gaze from a pair of melancholy gray eyes. “I cannot answer that,” said she. “I beg your pardon,” stammered I; for I guessed the answer to my question even as I was asking it. I knew the man--an arrogant coward, with the vanity to lure him into doing preposterous things and wilting weakness the instant trouble began to gather. “You wish me to save him?” I said, still confused and not knowing how to meet the situation. “I am asking rather for myself,” replied she. “I married him against my father’s wishes and warning. I have not loved him since the second month of our marriage. If he should be exposed, I think the disgrace would kill me.” Her lip curled in self-scorn. “A queer kind of pride, isn’t it?” she said. “To be able to live through the real shame, and to shrink only from the false.” “I’ll do it,” said I, with a sudden complete change of intention. “That is, if you promise me he will resign and not try to get a similar position elsewhere.” “I promise,” said she, rising, to show that she was taking not a moment more of my time than was unavoidable. “And I thank you”--and that was all. I kept my part of the agreement; she kept hers. In about two years she divorced him because he was flagrantly untrue to her. He married the woman and supported her and himself on the allowance Mary Kirkwood made him as soon as her father’s death let her into her share of the property. When I saw her again--one night at dinner at her brother’s house, before his wife divorced him--we met as if we were entire strangers. Neither of us made the remotest allusion to that first meeting. Going down to her house with Armitage often and being with her on the yacht for days together, I became fairly well acquainted with her, although she maintained the reserve which she did not increase for a stranger or drop even with her brother. You felt as if her personality were a large and interesting house, with room after room worth seeing, most attractive--but that no one ever was admitted beyond the drawing-room, not for a glimpse.