ht transparent to
his own scrutiny. Of late he had discovered in her something baffling
and subtle. This was not the same Marian but a Marian of whom his old
acquaintance had been merely the matrix as iron is the beginning of
tempered steel. The woman whose eyes dwelt on him now with a sort of
inscrutable indulgence was one who reversed their positions. It was as
if she read him easily in these days, while in herself she retained
depths which he had no means of fathoming. But two things he _could_
read in her eyes: courage and utter honesty--and these were qualities
which he esteemed.

After a little she asked him with a direct reading of his thoughts which
made him start uncomfortably, "You find me changed?"

Stuart drew a long breath. It broke suddenly upon him that if this woman
had begun life under other auspices she might have developed into
something rather magnificent.

"Not changed--" he answered promptly. "Transformed!"

"Thank you," she said, holding her voice steady. "It was the realization
of the change that made me try the experiment."

"What experiment?" His bewilderment was growing.

"If I'm going to tell you--and one can talk frankly of things that
belong unmistakably to the past--I must lay the foundation."

"Yes?"

"Of course, you realize that everyone said I fled to you--because we had
had an affair. Later when I was divorced and you saw nothing more of me,
they laughed at me--they thought I had grabbed at the reflection and
dropped my bone in the stream."

"But, Marian! You understood--"

She raised a hand. "Please let me finish in my own way. It's not too
easy at best."

"Forgive me."

"To their eyes, my one chance of rehabilitating my life lay in marrying
you. I mention this to forestall misunderstanding; because in what I've
got to say next it might logically occur to you as a thing I'd
contemplated myself."

"Surely," he exclaimed, "you don't think me so mean of mind as that."

With a somewhat rueful smile, she continued:

"When things became unendurable at home and I fled to your cottage,
what did you think of me?"

His response was immediate: "That you were in a panic. It seemed to you
a case of any port in a storm. I was geographically near and--"

"You really thought that?" A queer note came into her voice and she
added almost in a whisper as if echoing it to herself: "Just because you
were geographically near!"

"Why else?" he demanded. "Of course, in your indignation