This meeting was not to his taste. He had taken advantage of the first opportunity to be alone with his father’s wife, and now that they were together he was failing to give the right tone to the interview. It was proving disagreeable and he did not know how to change its key. It irritated him to find that Mrs. Craighill was calmly giving it direction. “Wayne, dear,” she said, her arm thrown over the back of her low chair, “you came home to see me and now you are not a bit nice.” “I came home because it’s home,” he replied doggedly. “But you haven’t been home at this hour within the memory of anybody on the place. I asked the maids--very discreetly--what time Mr. Wayne came home and they were embarrassed. You cut the Club for me this afternoon; I’m not going to have it any other way.” He rose and walked the length of the room, and when he had gained the bay window he looked back at her. She did not move and her head, the pretty arch of her neck, the graceful lines of her figure brought him quickly to her side. He took her hands roughly and drew her to her feet. “Yes, I came home when I did to see you alone,” he cried eagerly. “You knew I would come; you counted on it; you were sure of it!” “What a mind-reader you are!” she laughed, looking languidly up at him. He clasped her hands in both his own, and peered into her face. Her eyes questioned him long; they held him away from her as though by physical force. Then the colour surged suddenly in her face and throat as he bent toward her lips and she cried out softly and freed herself. “No! No! Not like that!” “There is no other way. You didn’t think you could come here and begin all over again and live under the same roof with me and have me forget! I tell you I am not brass or wood! No woman was ever so much to any man as you are to me. If I had not been a fool you would have belonged to me; and now, now you are here and we cannot be less to each other than we were once. You know that; I know it!” She was looking at him questioningly, with a wide-eyed gravity, and she was very white. She lifted her head slightly, as though by the act summoning her own courage, and took a step that brought her close to him; she laid her hands on his shoulders. “Wayne, I want you to help me--I want you to help me to be a good woman.” Her pallor had deepened; her lips trembled; the tears shone in her eyes. “Why did you come here? If you wanted my help you took a strange way of getting it. It strikes me that the reason you came is something that we had better not go into.” “That is not like you, Wayne. I suppose--I suppose--it would not occur to you that I admire and love your father; that, after the life I have led, the shelter of such a home as this and the protection of such a man mean more than I know how to describe. I haven’t the words to tell you what it means!” she ended with a little moan, and then: “It was only chance that threw me again in your way.”