d; ashamed, but brazening it out with a laugh. The doctor
said nothing; merely looked at him. After a moment, the big man turned
and went from the room.

Kate was oddly sorry for her husband. "He did not know what he was
doing," she murmured. "But oh, Jacques, if _you_ had been there, it
would not have happened!"

"No. Hereafter, I shall be there."

"Please, please," whispered the girl, and she began to cry. She was
quite unnerved. "Oh, I am afraid sometimes, Jacques! It's such a comfort
to know you are near, to hear your voice--even when you are as drunk as
the others!"

He went rather white about the lips. "Hereafter I shall be there," he
repeated steadily. "And I shall not be as drunk as the others. I shall
not be drunk at all."

After that night there was less company at Storm, and Kildare began to
make frequent absences from home, lasting sometimes over several days.
Kate was grateful, realizing that it was his way of showing her
consideration. But she was also lonely. For the first time, she missed
the companionship of women.

She made shy overtures to the tenants' wives, to the women in the
village. But the barrier of caste was very evident, and there were other
barriers. No virtue is so quick to take up arms as that of the middle
classes. Kildare as a landlord was not popular. Beauty, charm, did not
help her with them as it had with their husbands. There was the further
barrier, which all aliens in a rural community reach soon or late: the
well-nigh impassable barrier of strangeness. They would have none of
her. They looked askance at her winning sweetness; they accepted her
bounty with stony, ungrateful thanks.

She thought of asking friends to visit her, only to be brought up
sharply by the realization that hers was not a home to which such women
as she had known would care to come. Once she spoke to her husband
tentatively of sending for her mother.

"Oh, by all means, if you want her," he agreed, yawning a little. "But
what will that genteel female do with herself at Storm? There isn't a
tea-party nor an Episcopal Church within half a day's drive of us."

Kate knew that he spoke truly. Her mother would be both shocked and
unhappy at Storm. Let her keep what illusions she had a while longer.
The girl was young to be guarding other women's illusions.

And so she was thrown for company upon Jacques Benoix and his wife; the
latter a personality so colorless, so fragile, that strain as she might
she