helped me to keep the thing hushed up until we could make sure. I
hope we've succeeded; I hope so indeed. Hugh will see you soon, I know;
and it can be patched up, no doubt, after a fashion."

But at this Amabel cried:--"I can't.--I can't.--Oh--take me away.--Let
me hide until he divorces me. I can't see him."

"Divorces you?" Bertram's voice was sharp. "Have you disgraced
publicly--you and us? It's not you I'm thinking of so much as the family
name, father and mother. Hugh won't divorce you; he can't; he shan't.
After all you're a mere child and he didn't look after you." But this
was said rather in threat to Hugh than in leniency to Amabel.

She lay back in the chair, helpless, almost lifeless: let them do with
her what they would.

Bertram said that she should spend the night there and that he would see
Hugh in the morning. And:--"No; you needn't see him yet, if you feel you
can't. It may be arranged without that. Hugh will understand." And this
was the first ray of the light that was to grow and grow. Hugh would
understand.

She did not see him for two years.

All that had happened after her return to Bertram was a blur now. There
were hasty talks, Bertram defining for her her future position, one of
dignity it must be--he insisted on that; Hugh perfectly understood her
wish for the present, quite fell in with it; but, eventually, she must
take her place in her husband's home again. Even Bertram, intent as he
was on the family honour, could not force the unwilling wife upon the
merely magnanimous husband.

Her husband's magnanimity was the radiance that grew for Amabel during
these black days, the days of hasty talks and of her journey down to
Charlock House.

She had never seen Charlock House before; Sir Hugh had spoken of the
family seat as "a dismal hole," but, on that hot July evening of her
arrival, it looked peaceful to her, a dark haven of refuge, like the
promise of sleep after nightmare.

Mrs. Bray stood in the door, a grim but not a hostile warder: Amabel
felt anyone who was not hostile to be almost kind.

The house had been hastily prepared for her, dining-room and
drawing-room and the large bedroom upstairs, having the same outlook
over the lawn, the sycamores, the flat meadows. She could see herself
standing there now, looking about her at the bedroom where gaiety and
gauntness were oddly mingled in the faded carnations and birds of
paradise on the chintzes and in the vastness of the four-po