She had no right to suffer, but she did suffer now. As Peter had done months before, she suffered through the darkness. But with her there was no yielding to dear visions of a forbidden love, as there had been with him; there was no picturing of life as it might have been with him; no thrilling to the imaginary caresses and delights of a passion which, in her married self, was wholly unworthy. Rather was the night a long battle with the love that it so shamed her to find within herself. Thus, in this distress of her soul, she was at least spared the physical torture which Peter had endured. Not for an instant was her love for Peter translated, in her mind, into physical terms; she neither imagined nor desired its touch; in her guilt there was a strange innocence--an innocence characteristic of her. She would go through life unaware of the grosser aspects of things; under any circumstances, however equivocal, she would be curiously pure. In one thing only did she fall now to the level of less idealistic beings; in spite of her struggle to the contrary, she wondered, at last, if Peter loved her. She dared and stooped, in the privacy of the night, to wonder that. When Peter came to her the next afternoon, he found her haggard, but very quiet, very calm. Beneath her calmness, however, he divined the stir of troubled depths, and he carefully kept to the surface; ignored his long banishment; took up one impersonal topic after another for her entertainment; and was altogether so much the safe, unromantic, delightful old friend of the family that, but for the hammering of her pulses, he would have persuaded Sheila that the distress of the past night was a mere, ugly dream. But because she could not look at him without a catch of her breath; because she could not speak to him without first pausing to steady her voice; because all her tranquility was but desperate and painful effort, she knew the night was no dream, but even more of a reality than she had thought. "Peter," she said at last, with attempted lightness, "Peter, I'm going to meddle with your destiny." "What do you mean?" he asked, smiling at her. That smile of his almost cost her her self-control, so dear it was to her. But she went on bravely enough: "I'm going to secure you a wife." He threw up his hands in dismay. "Don't try," he pleaded. "You could never find a wife to suit me!" "But I _have_ found one who's sure to suit you." "You've actually selected her?--you have her waiting for me?" She nodded, trying to smile back at him now with a deceiving gayety. "May I know who the fair lady is?" "Of course. She's--Charlotte! She is just the woman for you, Peter." "Never," he said promptly. "She is charming and clever and handsome and kind, _but_--she's not the woman for me." "Peter"--and Sheila dropped her pretense of playfulness--"Peter, she's all that you need. She'd make a great man of you."