"'You see,' she said wistfully, 'people sometimes break after the strain of too much loyalty--I've adopted that word now. They don't take things easily enough, until, one day, they suddenly break and take things too easily! I've seen it happen, a dear sweet woman.... I'm talking so intimately to you because I expect you to understand, and not be too brilliantly conclusive to yourself about it. Of course you know that I am not talking directly of Fay, for it's absurd to suppose that there ever could be a strain on her loyalty about anything, but about my own theories. I've got lately into the habit, from so much watching, of doing her introspection for her, just as I still like doing her hair for her sometimes--for it's a shame that a mere maid should have all the fun, isn't it?' "But, after all, it was not to run so smoothly for dear Mrs. Richmond; her half-articulate anxiety--I can't really call it self-reproach--seemed to have held a parallel justification in its subject. Fay, knowing nothing of her good mother's shouldering of her burden, had done her own introspection as well as she could by herself; and came, as girls will, upon its results inconveniently as the marriage grew nearer--instead of having thought of it all _before_ as her mother had done for her! "I had a very good view of the pattern they unknowingly worked between them because, in my curious too-quickly developed position in that house, I was again made the _confidant_. I was, 'Since mother has quarrelled with all her "in-laws," the only sensible man about the premises,' Fay herself said once; a bloodless and unenviable prerogative so unsuitable to Vitiali's temper that he had never troubled to stoop down to claim it from the heights where his good fortune had enthroned him. For who, able to be something better, would trouble himself to hold the mean place of 'the sensible man about the premises?' I've never been lured into it since, anyway. "It was about a month later that, after a week in which I had not seen them, I called one afternoon and came face to face with Vitiali by the drawing-room door, which he had just closed behind him. "I'm so glad you have come, Howard,' he said, with his affectionate smile, retaining my hand in his; we were great friends, you understand. 'I have just left Fay, looking exactly as though she were going to write a book or a tragedy. Oh, so serious! "'Come on, quickly,' he said, catching me by the arm and hurrying me to the door. 'Let her see you before she takes a pen in her hand--let her see a man who actually has written something, and take warning. "'Of course, you don't look like an author, old man,' he soothed my protest. 'You look just like any one else, but more sympathetic. That is why I am asking you to make Fay look not so serious--Oh, it's terrible, that quiet Fay seriousness!' He held me at arm's length with a sudden gesture. 'Can you make a woman laugh?' he asked. "'I can do nothing else,' I answered.