lly grasped The Ancient Mariner until now? People
_must_ tell their troubles to some one--or they'd corrode inside."

"Go ahead," MacRae encouraged.

"When Norman Gower went overseas we were engaged," she said bluntly, and
stopped. She was not looking at MacRae now. She stared at the opposite
wall, her fingers locked together in her lap.

"For four years," she went on, "I've been hoping, dreaming, waiting,
loving. To-day he came home to tell me that he married in England two
years ago. Married in the madness of a drunken hour--that is how he puts
it--a girl who didn't care for anything but the good time his rank and
pay could give her."

"I think you're in luck," MacRae said soberly.

"What queer creatures men are!" She seemed not to have heard him--to be
thinking her own thoughts out loud. "He says he loves me, that he has
loved me all the time, that he feels as if he had been walking in his
sleep and fallen into some muddy hole. And I believe him. It's terrible,
Johnny."

"It's impossible," MacRae declared savagely. "If he's got in that kind
of a hole, let him stay there. You're well out of it. You ought to be
glad."

"But I'm not," she said sadly. "I'm not made that way. I can't let a
thing become a vital part of my life and give it up without a pang."

"I don't see what else you can do," MacRae observed. "Only brace up and
forget it."

"It isn't quite so simple as that," she sighed. "Norman's w--this woman
presently got tired of him. Evidently she had no scruples about getting
what she wanted, nor how. She went away with another man. Norman is
getting a divorce--the decree absolute will be granted in March next. He
wants me to marry him."

"Will you?"

Dolly looked up to meet MacRae's wondering stare. She nodded.

"You're a triple-plated fool," he said roughly.

"I don't know," she replied thoughtfully. "Norman certainly has been.
Perhaps I am too. We should get on--a pair of fools together."

The bitterness in her voice stung MacRae.

"You really should have loved me," he said, "and I you."

"But you don't, Jack. You have never thought of that before."

"I could, quite easily."

Dolly considered this a moment.

"No," she said. "You like me. I know that, Johnny. I like you, too. You
are a man, and I'm a woman. But if you weren't bursting with sympathy
you wouldn't have thought of that. If Norman had some of your
backbone--but it wouldn't make any difference. If you know what it is
that draws