"And you are wrong," said the lady, who, although nettled by the applicability of his remarks to her own case, had recovered her composure. "Let us say that a good woman marries a man, and that he dies--not the _death_--but dies to her. Tires of her, carries his love to another, and all that. Isn't he as dead, even if she loved him, as if he had really died? He is dead to her--buried--men don't come back. Well, maybe the more she loved that man the quicker she is to get the service read over him--that's divorce--and find another whom she can trust and love. Suppose that happens to her twice. The cases would seem identical, sir, I think. Except that I could understand divorcing a man who had become intolerable to me; but I could never, never fancy myself marrying again--if my husband, in the course of nature, had died still loving me, still faithful to me. So you see the cases are not identical. And that only remarriage after divorce is defensible." "I take your point," said Saterlee. She had spoken warmly and vehemently, with an honest ring in her voice. "I have never thought of it along those lines. See that furrow across the road--that's where a snake has crossed. But I may as well tell you, Ma'am, that I myself have buried more than one wife. And yet when I size myself up to myself I don't seem a regular hell-hound." "If we are to be on an honest footing," said the lady, "I must tell you that I have divorced more than one husband, and yet when I size myself up, as you call it, I do not seem to myself a lost woman. It's true that I act for my living--" "I know," he interrupted, "you are Mrs. Kimbal. But I thought I knew more about you than I seem to. I'm Saterlee. And my business at Carcasonne House is the same as yours." She was silent for a moment. And then: "Well," she said, "here we are. And that's lucky in a way. We both seem to want the same thing--that is, to keep our children from marrying each other. We can talk the matter over and decide how to do it." "We can talk it over anyway, as you say," said Saterlee. "But--" and he fished in his pocket and brought out his son's letter and gave it to her. She read it in the waning light. "But," he repeated gently, "that don't read like a letter that a brute of a son would write to a brute of a father; now, does it?" She did not answer. But she opened her purse and took out a carefully and minutely folded sheet of note-paper. "That's my Dolly's letter to me," she said, "and it doesn't sound like--" her voice broke. He took the letter from her and read it. "No, it doesn't," he said. And he said it roughly, because nothing brought rough speech out of the man so surely as tears--when they were in his own eyes. "Well," said Mrs. Kimbal with a sigh, "let's talk." "No," said Saterlee, "let's think." IV They could hear from far ahead a sound as of roaring waters.