There was no jest in the man's voice as he answered: “I'll tell you what you will do to-night,--you will go to bed and you will go to sleep. You will leave the door to your room wide-open, and I shall lie right there on that couch, so near that a whisper from you will reach me. We will have no more of this midnight prowling, I promise you. If any ghost dares appear, we--” The reassuring words died on Brian Kent's lips. His eyes, looking over Betty Jo's shoulders, were fixed and staring, and the look on his face sent a chill of horror to the girl's heart. She dared not move nor look around as he sat like a man turned to stone. A woman's laugh broke the dead silence. With a scream, Betty Jo sprung to her feet and whirled about. As one in a trance, Brian Kent arose and stood beside her. The woman, who stood in the open doorway, laughed again. Martha Kent's heavy drinking the night before, when her clubhouse friends in a wild debauch had tried to help her to forget, was the climax of many months of like excesses. The mood in which she had sent the man Green from her room was the last despairing flicker of her better instincts. Moved by her memories of better things,--of a better love and dreams and ideals,--she had spent a little hour or two in sentimental regret for that which she had so recklessly cast aside. And then, because there was within her no foundation of abiding principle for her sentiment, she had again put on the character which had so separated her from the life of the man to whom she was married, indeed, but with whom she was never one. With the burning consciousness of what she might have been and of what she was ever tormenting her, she sank, as the hours passed, deeper and deeper into the quicksands of physical indulgence until, in her mad determination to destroy utterly her ability to feel remorse, she lost all mental control of herself, and responded to every insane whim of her drink-disordered brain. As she stood there, now, in the doorway of that little log house by the river,--face to face with the man and the woman who, though they were united in their love, were yet separated by the very fact of her existence,--she was, in all her hideous, but pitiful, repulsiveness, the legitimate creation of those life-forces which she so fitly personified. Betty Jo instinctively drew closer to Brian's side. “Hello, Brian, dear!” said the woman, with a drunken leer. “Thought I'd call to see you in your charming love-nest that Harry Green raved so about. Can't you introduce me to your little sweetheart?” “No?” she continued, and laughed again. Then coming an unsteady step toward them, she added, thickly: “Very well, Brian, old sport; you won't introduce me,--I'll have to introduce myself.” She grinned with malicious triumph at Betty Jo: “Don't be frightened, my dear. It's all right. I'm nobody of importance,--just his wife,--that's all,--just his wife.”