ized you--and I don't blame you for
it. Out at Apex you'd have acted different. You never NEVER would have
given way to your feelings before you'd got your divorce."

A slow blush rose to Undine's forehead.

"He seemed so unhappy--" she murmured.

"Oh, I KNOW!" said Indiana in a tone of cold competence. She gave Undine
an impatient glance. "What was the understanding between you, when you
left Europe last August to go out to Dakota?"

"Peter was to go to Reno in the autumn--so that it wouldn't look too
much as if we were acting together. I was to come to Chicago to see him
on his way out there."

"And he never came?"

"No."

"And he stopped writing?"

"Oh, he never writes."

Indiana heaved a deep sigh of intelligence. "There's one perfectly clear
rule: never let out of your sight a man who doesn't write."

"I know. That's why I stayed with him--those few weeks last summer...."

Indiana sat thinking, her fine shallow eyes fixed unblinkingly on her
friend's embarrassed face.

"I suppose there isn't anybody else--?"

"Anybody--?"

"Well--now you've got your divorce: anybody else it would come in handy
for?"

This was harder to bear than anything that had gone before: Undine could
not have borne it if she had not had a purpose. "Mr. Van Degen owes it
to me--" she began with an air of wounded dignity.

"Yes, yes: I know. But that's just talk. If there IS anybody else--"

"I can't imagine what you think of me, Indiana!"

Indiana, without appearing to resent this challenge, again lost herself
in meditation.

"Well, I'll tell him he's just GOT to see you," she finally emerged from
it to say.

Undine gave a quick upward look: this was what she had been waiting
for ever since she had read, a few days earlier, in the columns of her
morning journal, that Mr. Peter Van Degen and Mr. and Mrs. James J.
Rolliver had been fellow-passengers on board the Semantic. But she did
not betray her expectations by as much as the tremor of an eye-lash. She
knew her friend well enough to pour out to her the expected tribute of
surprise.

"Why, do you mean to say you know him, Indiana?"

"Mercy, yes! He's round here all the time. He crossed on the steamer
with us, and Mr. Rolliver's taken a fancy to him," Indiana explained, in
the tone of the absorbed bride to whom her husband's preferences are the
sole criterion.

Undine turned a tear-suffused gaze on her. "Oh, Indiana, if I could only
see him again I know it would b