Till gradually, thinking of Aliette, his manhood came back to him. Let Brunton do his damnedest. Let them be outlaws. Even in their outlawry they would possess one another. Soon, Brunton would be brought to reason. Meanwhile, even if he were not soon brought to reason, they, the outlaws, would find people to stand by them; people like his mother. And at that, abruptly, Ronnie remembered the letter Aliette had written to her sister, the promise he had made to Jimmy. Somehow it needed more courage than he had required in facing Aliette's husband to lift the telephone and make his appointment with Mollie! 6 Over a snack of luncheon--snatched late and hastily at a little uncomfortable coffee-shop near the Griffin--Ronnie's usual calm returned. He realized that he had made a fool of himself in going to see Brunton; that Jimmy, after all, had been right. Confound Brunton! Brunton's "dog-in-the-manger" attitude would not endure, could not endure. Even Carrington had given way in the long run. It was only a question of patience. Still, he would have to break things very gently to Aliette's sister. Betty Masterman was out; and Mollie received her sister's lover alone in the little red-papered sitting-room which seemed so cozy to the Philistine mind of James Wilberforce. "It's nice of you to call," she said perfunctorily. The voice might have been that of Aliette, of the socially poised Aliette as Ronnie first remembered her: but the girl's violet eyes were stern with suspicion; her red lips showed unsmiling, uncompromising. "Won't you sit down?" she went on. "Thanks. I sha'n't keep you very long." Always impossibly shy with women, the man did not know how to begin. "You've got some message for me," the girl prompted "Some message from----" "From your sister." She seated herself, avoiding his eyes. "Your sister and I," he began bruskly---- And in those four words--even without the halting explanation which followed--it seemed to Mollie Fullerford that she knew the whole story. But she was not going to help him out. Why should she? The story--carefully though he told it--revolted her. She felt hot; hot and dirty and ashamed. Hurt, too, as though the healed scars of her bodily wounds were opening afresh. All the suspicions of the past weeks, all her still-smoldering resentment that Aliette should have let her return unwarned to Hector's house, all her balked love for James Wilberforce, harshened Mollie's judgment. She saw Cavendish no longer a "sober-sides" but a hypocrite; and so seeing, hated him for his imagined hypocrisy. "You see," he concluded, "it wasn't Aliette's fault. I mean the running away in a hurry. You mustn't condemn her. I was to blame for that. I was to blame, from beginning to end." "Of course," said that Mollie who had once thought "most women rotters." "It's always the man who's to blame."