e, it wouldn't be easy, but--you can't get away with
it, Stewart. That's one way of looking at it. There's another."

"What's that?"

"Starting with a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to marry, and
not a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to
it."

"She wouldn't understand in a thousand years."

"Then you'd better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea
that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow.
A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a
man has done with his life before a girl--the right girl--comes into
it isn't a personal injury to her, since she wasn't a part of his life
then. You know what I mean. But she has a right to know it before she
chooses."

"How many would choose under those circumstances?" he jibed.

Peter smiled. "Quite a few," he said cheerfully. "It's a wrong system,
of course; but we can get a little truth out of it."

"You can't get away with it" stuck in Stewart's mind for several days.
It was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before Stewart had
recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell
Anita. In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the
affair against his conscience and came out victorious.

Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare, they
complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking. Into the
bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows turned soft by
midday; and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid
citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera. Anita's arm forbade her
traveling. In the reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in
the valley below the pension with one of the women who wished to take
the baths.

It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first excursion after
the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the chaperon's treatment called
for an early retiring hour, which was highly as he had wished it and
rather unnerving after all. A man may decide that a dose of poison is
the remedy for all his troubles, but he does not approach his hour with
any hilarity. Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and
looked haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to
leave.

He did not lack courage however. It was his great asset, physical and
mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless. The evening was
quiet, and they elected to si