And then, just as Drew thought that at last he saw Happiness stop and turn and look at him a bit whimsically, Aleck Reese came back to town--Aleck Reese, not as Fate should have had him, drunken with flattery, riotous with revelry, chasing madly some new infatuation, but Aleck Reese sobered, dazed, temporarily purified by the shock of his loss, if not by the loss itself. For a week, blissfully unconscious of any cause, Drew had watched with growing perplexity and anxiety the sudden, abrupt flag in the girl's health and spirits and general friendliness. Flowers, fruit, candy, books, excursion plans had all successively, one by one, failed to rouse either her interest or her ordinary civility. And then one night, dragging home extra late from a worried, wearisome day at the office, faint for his dinner, sick for his sleep, he found the apartment perfectly dark and cheerless, the fire unlighted, the table unset, and Ruth herself lying in a paroxysm of grief on the floor under his stumbling feet. With his dizzy head reeling blindly, and his hands shaking like an aspen, he picked her up and tried to carry her to the couch; but she wrenched herself away from him, and walked over to the window and halfway back again before she spoke. "Aleck Reese has come home," she announced dully, and reached up unthinkingly and turned a blast of electric light full on her ghastly face. Drew clutched at the back of the nearest chair. "Have you seen him?" he almost whispered. The girl nodded. "Yes. He's been here a week. I've seen him twice. Once--all day at the tennis club--and this afternoon I met him on the street, and he came home with me to get--a book." "Why didn't you tell me before that he was here?" She shrugged her shoulders wearily. "I thought his coming wasn't going to matter," she faltered, "but--" "But what?" said Drew. Her arms fell limply down to her sides and her chin began to quiver. "He kissed me this afternoon," she stammered, "and I--kissed him. And, worse than that, we were both--glad." Trying to brush the fog away from his eyes, Drew almost sprang across the room at her, and she gave a queer little cry and fled, not away from him, but right into his arms, as though _there_ was her only haven. "Would you be apt to hurt me?" she gasped with a funny-sad sort of inquisitiveness. Then she backed away and held out her hand like a man's to Drew's shaking fingers. "I'm very much ashamed," she said, "about this afternoon. Oh, very, very, very much ashamed. I haven't ever been a really good wife to you, you know, but I never have cheated before until to-day. I promise you faithfully that it sha'n't happen again. But, Drew"--her face flushed utterly crimson--"but, Drew--I honestly think that it _had_ to happen to-day." Drew's tortured eyes watched her keenly for a second and then his look softened. "Will you please tell Aleck," he suggested, "that you told me all about it and that I--laughed?"