This was the position he took, and he maintained it during the rest of their drive, and at intervals during the rather stately dinner for two people that was the evening custom of their big country house. After dinner, however, as he sat down to coffee with his wife in the library, he was forced to adopt another view. His sister-in-law came in suddenly and dramatically, the fur cloak she had thrown about her for a hasty drive falling to the floor as she entered the door. Anne sprang up from her easy chair. “Mildred! What’s happened?” For Mildred’s pallor, and her visible struggle for composure, as she stood with both hands upon the back of a chair to steady herself, left no doubt that she came because of some definite happening. Hobart moved to withdraw. “I imagine you and Anne might like to have a talk together, Mildred. I’ll just——” “No,” Mildred said in a strained and plaintive voice, “I’ve come for help. You’ve both got to help me somehow, because I can’t stand it. I really can’t.” He was distressed for her. “Anything—anything in the world——” “I _hope_ you mean it,” Mildred said, staring at him with wide and desperate eyes. “If any one can do anything to help me it’s you, Hobart, because you’ve always been able to do everything you’ve ever wanted to do. Maybe you won’t want to help me.” “What?” he cried. “My dear girl!” “No,” she said, pathetically;—“maybe you won’t want to. After the way you treated me before them at the club, I shouldn’t be sure you’d want to.” “My dear sister, don’t think that,” he begged. “I see I did hurt you, and I only ask a chance to make up to you for it. What can I do?” “Nothing!” his wife said, taking the reply into her own mouth, as she put an arm about her sister and stood facing him scornfully. “Nothing that will make up to her for what you did. That’s something you can never do, because even you can’t recall and do again what has passed.” Troubled, admiring Anne for the proud anger of her attitude, and secretly pleased with her “even you,” he gave her a queer look in which there was a gleam of doggedness. “I’ll try, at any rate,” he said; and then, more casually, he addressed his sister-in-law: “You drove over alone, Mildred?” “As soon as John left the house after dinner,” she said. “I kept up till he went, and then I found I couldn’t bear it any longer—I had to ask for help. After he put her into the car with me at the club, he asked me why I was so quiet, and I said I had a bad headache;—it was true enough, too. She said that was ‘too bad’ and immediately proposed that we should ‘all three’ drive into town after dinner to a cabaret vaudeville and dance and late supper!” “She did?” Hobart asked. “Not just after you’d told them your head ached?” “Yes. She said the way to cure a headache was to ‘be gay and forget it.’” “What did you tell her, Mildred?”