Sitting on the table as usual, she puffed vigorously at her cigarette, blowing clouds of smoke, through which Lorraine could not see that her eyes were dim with tears. For Hal’s unerring instinct told her that, at a critical moment, Lorraine had taken a wrong path. Lorraine, however, was not looking in Hal’s direction. She had moved to the window, and stood with her back to the room, gazing across the Park, hiding likewise misty, tell-tale eyes. Suddenly, as Hal continued silent, she turned to her with a swift movement of half-expressed protest. “Hal! you shan’t condemn me, you shan’t even judge me. Probably you can’t understand, because your life is so different—always has been so different; but at least you can try to be the same. What difference has it made between you and me anyhow?... What difference need it make? I have got my chance now, and I am going to be a brilliant success, instead of a struggling beginner. What does the rest matter between you and me?” “It doesn’t matter between you and me. But it matters to you. I feel I’d give my right hand if you hadn’t done it.” “How could I help doing it? Oh, I can’t explain; it’s no use. We all have to fight our own battles in the long run—friends or no friends. Only the friends worth having stick to one, even when it has been a nasty, unpleasant sort of battle.” That hard look, with the hopelessness behind it, was coming back into Lorraine’s eyes. She was too loyal to tell even Hal what her mother had been like the last few months before the critical moment came, and at the critical moment itself. She could not explain just how many difficulties her marriage had seemed a way out from. There had been other men who had not proposed marriage. There had been insistent creditors—her mother’s as well as her own. There had been that deep hunger for something approaching a real home, and for a sense of security, in a life necessarily full of insecurities. Obdurate, difficult theatre managers, powerful, jealous fellow-actresses, ill health, bad luck! Behind the glamour and the glitter of the stage, what a world of carking care, of littleness, meanness, jealousy, and intrigue she had found herself called upon to do battle with. And now, if only her husband proved amenable, proved livable with, how different everything would be? But in any case Hal must be there. Somehow nothing of all this showed in her face as she fronted the smoker, still blowing clouds of smoke before her eyes. “What has become of Rod?” Hal asked suddenly. Lorraine winced a little, but held her ground steadily. “Rod had to go. What could Rod and I have done with £500 a year?” “My own”—from the blunt-speaking one—“it surely seems as if you might have thought of that before you allowed Rod to run all over the country after you, and get ‘gated’, and very nearly ‘sent down’, and spend a year or two’s income ahead in trying to give you pleasure.”