She held in her hand, uncertain whether to burn it, the last wild letter of Alexis. “I’m glad he’s gone to Poland,” she said reflectively. “Why?” asked Myra, not looking up from the trunk by which she was kneeling. “It’s a man’s work, after all,” said Olivia. “So’s digging potatoes.” “I suppose you’re right,” said Olivia. She tore up the letter and threw the fragments into the fire. “What a hell marriage can be.” “It can,” said Myra. “You’re lucky. You’ve escaped.” “Have I?” asked Myra intent on the packing of underwear. At her tone Olivia started. “What do you mean?” Myra looked up, sitting back on her heels. “Do you suppose, dearie, you’re the only woman in trouble in the world?” Olivia moved a step towards her. “Are you too in trouble, Myra?” “I’ve been in trouble for the last twenty years, ever since I left your mother’s house to be married to him.” Olivia stared at her open-mouthed, lost in amazement. This prim, puritanical, predestined spinster of a Myra—— “You—married?” She swerved back into a chair, reeling ever so little under this new shock. If there had been one indubitable, solid fact in her world, one that had stood out absolute during all the disillusions of the past year, it was Myra’s implacable spinsterhood. Why, she had seen Myra every day of her life, ever since she could remember, except for the annual holiday. Yes. Those holidays, always a subject for jest with her father and brothers when they were alive. No one had known whither she had gone, or when she had emerged on her reappearance. She had never given an address—so far as Olivia knew. And yet her plunge into the unknown had received the unquestioned acceptance of the family. Only last November she had gone in her mysterious way, taking, however, only a fortnight instead of her customary month. Olivia, Heaven knew why, had formed the careless impression that she had betaken herself to some tabby-like Home for religious incurables, run by her dissenting organization. And all this time, tabby-like in another sense, she had been stealing back to her husband. Where was Truth in the world? She repeated mechanically: “You—married?” Myra rose stiffly, her joints creaking, and stood before her mistress, and perhaps for the first time in her life Olivia saw a gleam of light in the elderly woman’s expressionless pale blue eyes. “Yes, I’m married. Before the end of my honeymoon, I found he wasn’t in his right mind. I had to shut him up, and come back to your mother. He’s alive still, in the County Asylum. I go to see him every year.” In a revulsion of feeling, Olivia sprang to her feet and held out both her arms. “Myra—my dear old Myra——” Myra suffered the young embrace, and then gently disengaged herself. “There—there——” she said. “Why have you never told me?” “Would it have done you any good?” “It would have made me much more thoughtful and considerate.”