chance. This may have been due
to the necessity of listening to Captain Gordon.

At all events it was only as she passed Colonel Innes on her way to the
drawing-room and saw ahead of her the very modish receding back of Mrs.
Innes that she realized other things--crime and freedom.

It was the reversion of power; it brought her a great exultation. She
sat down under it in a corner, hoping to be left alone, with a white
face and shining eyes. Power and opportunity and purpose--righteous
purpose!

The circumstances had come to her in a flash; she brought them up again
steadily and scrutinized them. The case was absolutely clear. Frank
Prendergast had been dead just seven months. Colonel Innes imagined
himself married four years. Violet Prendergast was a bigamist, and
Horace Innes had no wife.

That was the marvellous transcendent fact; that was what lifted her and
carried her on great pulsing waves that rolled beyond the walls of the
little fripperied drawing-room and its collection of low-necked women,
out into her life, which had not these boundaries. She lived again in a
possible world. There was no stone wall between herself and joy.

The old Mussulman butler who offered her coffee looked at her with
aroused curiosity--here was certainly a memsahib under the favour of
God--and as she stirred it, the shadow that Violet Prendergast had
thrown upon her life faded out of her mind in the light that was there.
Then she looked up and met that lady's vivid blue eyes. Mrs. Innes's
colour had not returned, but there was a recklessness in the lines of
her mouth. In the way she held her chin, expressing that she had been
reflecting on old scores, and anticipated the worst. Meeting this
vigilance Miss Anderson experienced a slight recoil. Her happiness, she
realized, had been brought to her in the hands of ugly circumstance.

'And so melodramatic,' she told herself. 'It is really almost vulgar. In
a story I should have no patience with it.' But she went on stirring her
coffee with a little uncontrollable smile.

A moment later she had to contemplate the circumstance that her hostess
was addressing her. Mrs. Innes wished to be introduced. Mrs. Innes,
incarnate, conscious sensation, was smiling at her, saying that she must
know so great a friend of her husband's. He made so few friends, and she
was so grateful to anybody who was good to him. Eyes and voice tolerably
in rein, aware of the situation at every point, she had a me