Spragg had cowered when she was a charming golden-curled cherub.
But life had administered some of the discipline which her parents had
spared her, and she pulled herself together with a gasp of pain. "Of
course he's been turned against me. His wife has the whole of New York
behind her, and I've no one; but I know it would be all right if I could
only see him."

Her friend made no answer, and Undine pursued, with an irrepressible
outbreak of her old vehemence: "Indiana Rolliver, if you won't do it for
me I'll go straight off to his hotel this very minute. I'll wait there
in the hall till he sees me!"

Indiana lifted a protesting hand. "Don't, Undine--not that!"

"Why not?"

"Well--I wouldn't, that's all."

"You wouldn't? Why wouldn't you? You must have a reason." Undine faced
her with levelled brows. "Without a reason you can't have changed so
utterly since our last talk. You were positive enough then that I had a
right to make him see me."

Somewhat to her surprise, Indiana made no effort to elude the challenge.
"Yes, I did think so then. But I know now that it wouldn't do you the
least bit of good."

"Have they turned him so completely against me? I don't care if they
have! I know him--I can get him back."

"That's the trouble." Indiana shed on her a gaze of cold compassion.
"It's not that any one has turned him against you. It's worse than
that--"

"What can be?"

"You'll hate me if I tell you."

"Then you'd better make him tell me himself!"

"I can't. I tried to. The trouble is that it was YOU--something you did,
I mean. Something he found out about you--"

Undine, to restrain a spring of anger, had to clutch both arms of her
chair. "About me? How fearfully false! Why, I've never even LOOKED at
anybody--!"

"It's nothing of that kind." Indiana's mournful head-shake seemed to
deplore, in Undine, an unsuspected moral obtuseness. "It's the way you
acted to your own husband."

"I--my--to Ralph? HE reproaches me for that? Peter Van Degen does?"
"Well, for one particular thing. He says that the very day you went off
with him last year you got a cable from New York telling you to come
back at once to Mr. Marvell, who was desperately ill."

"How on earth did he know?" The cry escaped Undine before she could
repress it.

"It's true, then?" Indiana exclaimed. "Oh, Undine--"

Undine sat speechless and motionless, the anger frozen to terror on her
lips.

Mrs. Rolliver turned on her the reproachful ga