If Regina had ordered a plate of soup it would have been brought to her immediately, because at one o'clock that comestible would have been ready and awaiting the wishes of customers. But Regina, as I have said, like most women in trouble, ordered the food and drink that were nearest her heart, and therefore she had to wait while the tea was brewed and the muffin toasted. The waiting did her good. She was alone, as it happened, in the comfortable room over the shop, and thus she was able to grasp the situation more clearly than she had done while still talking to the jeweler's assistant, when she had had to consider the ordinary conventions of existence. Poor Regina! She sat there by the tall mantelshelf and stared at the paper roses which filled the summer grate. Her Alfred, her noble Alfred, had fallen from his pedestal--he was hers no longer! In all the years of their married life, indeed in their knowledge of each other, she had never wronged Alfred by even so much as a doubt of his nobility. To her he had been noble, truly noble, kind, affectionate, dignified and a highly successful man--and now all was over; her house of matrimony had fallen about her ears like a pack of cards--she had been supplanted by another. Truly Regina's thoughts were very bitter. She had been supplanted by another--what was she going to do? It came to her memory that in times gone by, when other women had fallen upon evil days of a like description, she had helped to bear their sorrows with a very light heart. Well, it had not then entered her head that their portion might one day be hers; but now the blow had fallen upon herself, and she must perforce give herself the same advice that she had given to others. "My dear," she had remarked once to a poor little woman whose husband had been spoiled by over-much adoration, "you have made one mistake in your life: you have been too good to that husband of yours. What? Nobody could be too good to him? You have, my dear, and it doesn't do to be too good to a man for all time whether he behaves himself or not; it doesn't do to put all your wares in your front window. Keep something back; let there be always some little corner of womanly dignity which men, even husbands, must respect." "But, Mrs. Whittaker," the little woman had replied, "I haven't any dignity where Jack is concerned; I don't want any dignity, I only want Jack, and he has gone away and left me." How well she remembered the words as she sat alone in the pastry-cook's shop in Regent Street, how well she remembered! Well, she felt very much as that little woman had felt--she did not care about her dignity any more; she only wanted Alfred, and if Alfred was deceiving her, if Alfred was living a double life and sharing his heart with another, she only wanted to go back to the blissful time of blind ignorance, when to her he had been the embodiment of manly dignity and robust virtue.