e, Monsieur Ember."

From beyond the curtains, Whitaker's voice lifted up impatiently: "That
you, old man? Come right in!"

Nodding to the maid, Ember thrust aside the portieres and stepped into
the brightly-lighted dressing-room, then paused, bowing and smiling his
self-contained, tolerant smile: in appearance as imperturbable and
well-groomed as though he had just escaped from the attentions of a
valet, rather than from a furious hand-to-hand tussle with a vicious
monomaniac.

Mary Whitaker, as yet a little pale and distrait and still in costume,
was reclining on a chaise-longue. Whitaker was standing close beside his
wife; his face the theatre of conflicting emotions; Ember, at least,
thought with a shrewd glance to recognize a pulsating light of joy
beneath a mask of interest and distress and a flush of embarrassment.

"I am intruding?" he suggested gravely, with a slight turn as if
offering to withdraw.

"No."

The word faltering on the lips of Mary Whitaker was lost in an emphatic
iteration by Whitaker.

"Sit down!" he insisted. "As if we'd let you escape, now, after you'd
kept us here in suspense!"

He offered a chair, but Ember first advanced to take the hand held out
to him by the woman on the chaise-longue.

"You are feeling--more composed?" he inquired.

Her gaze met his bravely. "I am--troubled, perhaps--but happy," she
said.

"Then I am very glad," he said, smiling at the delicate colour that
enhanced her exquisite beauty as she made the confession. "I had hoped
as much." He looked from the one to the other. "You ... have made up
your minds?"

The wife answered for both: "It is settled, dear friend: I can struggle
no longer. I thought myself a strong woman; I have tried to believe
myself a genius bound upon the wheel of an ill-starred destiny; but I
find I am"--the glorious voice trembled slightly--"only a woman in love
and no stronger than her love."

"I am very glad," Ember repeated, "for both your sakes. It's a happy
consummation of my dearest wishes."

"We owe you everything," Whitaker said with feeling, dropping an awkward
hand on the other's shoulder. "It was you who threw us together, down
there on the Great West Bay, so that we learned to know one another...."

"I plead guilty to that little plot--yes," Ember laughed. "But, best of
all, this comes at just the right time--the rightest time, when there
can no longer be any doubts or questions or misunderstandings, no ground
for fu