e to herself that the obligation to
be generous on his part was small. She could hardly be said to have
treated him with much liberality in the past.

She had used him without scruple as a means to an end. She had made him
the instrument for escaping from a predicament which she found
unbearably irksome. That she had done so in the heat of passion was
small palliation. For the present, at least, she wisely resolved to make
the best of things. It could not last forever. The day must come when
she could free herself from the bonds that now held her.

It was characteristic of her unyielding pride, of her reluctance to
confess to defeat, that the thought of appealing to her brother never
once entered her head.

For this reason, it was long before she could bring herself to write the
promised letter to Eddie. What was there to say? The things that would
have relieved her, in a sense, to tell, must remain forever locked in
her own heart. In the end, she compromised by sending a letter confined
entirely to describing her new home. As she read it over, she thanked
the Fates that Eddie's was not a subtile or analytical mind. He would
read nothing between the lines. But Gertie? Well, it couldn't be helped!

It was some two months after her marriage that she received a letter
from Miss Pringle in answer to the one she had written while she was
still an inmate of her brother's house.

Miss Pringle confined herself largely to an account of her Continental
wanderings and her bloodless encounters with various foreigners and
their ridiculous un-English customs from which she had emerged
triumphant and victorious. Mrs. Hubbard's precarious state of health had
led her into being unusually captious, it seemed. Miss Pringle was more
than ever content to be back in Tunbridge Wells, where all the world
was, by comparison, sane and reasonable in behavior.

When it came to touching upon her friend's amazing environment and
unconventional experiences, Miss Pringle was discretion itself. But if
her paragraphs had bristled with exclamation points, they could not, to
one who understood her mental processes, have more clearly betrayed her
utter disapproval and amazement that English people, and descendants of
English people, could so far forget themselves as to live in any such
manner.

Replying to this letter was only a degree less hard than writing to
Eddie. Nora's ready pen faltered more than once, and many pages were
destroyed before an