As Martha drove back to the atelier, after an affectionate _au revoir_ to the princess, she was conscious that something was rankling in her mind. When she came to search for the ground of this feeling, she found it to exist in the confession of love which the princess had made. This knowledge caused Martha to realize that she had not even yet succeeded in putting from her the imaginings by which she had connected her brother and her friend. Before knowing the princess she had always cherished the belief that her brother would sink below her ideal of him if he ever loved a second time. Lately, however, she had imagined the possibility of his telling her, after knowing the princess, that the old love was not the perfect one he had imagined it; and she could fancy herself forgiving him for loving a second time, with the princess as his apology. It had even seemed to her lately so monstrously wrong and cruel that Harold’s life should be wantonly wrecked that she was now prepared to accept a good deal more than would once have seemed possible, in order to see it mended. Martha, for all her demure appearance, had something that was more or less savage and lawless in her nature, especially where Harold was concerned; and the same feeling, in a lesser degree, dominated her in regard to the princess. She had long ago admitted to herself the fact that Harold had missed his chance of happiness in love; but it was as painful as it was unexpected to her to find that the princess too had loved before. She had known that she had been married, but with very little difficulty she had constructed for herself a theory of that marriage in which the princess had played the part of an innocent victim to circumstance. For instance, she might have been married by her parents in early youth to a man perhaps far older than herself, whom she had never loved, and for whose death she could not have grieved much. It was a surprise to Martha now to find how entirely she had let this utterly unfounded idea take possession of her. The words of the princess this morning had shattered it to atoms, and in spite of herself she felt strangely heavy-hearted. VI