, Sheila," she said.

"She isn't very nice," the little girl said miserably. "We don't tell
any one. She always cries and screams and makes us trouble?"

"Did she live with you in Paris?"

"Only sometimes."

"Does she do--something that she should not do, Sheila?" Nancy asked,
with her mind on inebriety, or drug addiction.

"She just isn't very nice," Sheila repeated. "She is _histerique_; she
pounded me with her hands, and hurt me."

Nancy telephoned to the Inn that she had a headache, and shut herself
into her room, without food, to gather her scattered forces. She lay
wide-awake all the night through, her mind trying to work its way
through the lethargy of shock it had received. She remembered falling
down the cellar stairs, when she was a little girl, and lying for
hours on the hard stone floor, perfectly serene and calm, without
pain, until she tried to do so much as move a little finger or lift an
eyelid, when the intolerable nausea would begin. She was calm now,
until she made the attempt to think what it was that had so prostrated
her, and then the anguish spread through her being and convulsed her
with unimaginable distress of mind and body.

By morning she had herself in hand again,--at least to the extent of
dealing with the unthinkable fact that Collier Pratt, her lover, the
man to whom she had given the lover's right to hold her in his arms
and cover her upturned face with kisses, had a living wife, and that
he was not free to make honorable love to any woman.

Her life had been too sound, too sweet, to give her any perspective on
a situation of the kind. It was inconceivable to her that a married
man should make advances to an unmarried woman,--but gradually she
began to make excuses for this one man whose circumstances had been so
exceptional. Tied to an insane creature, who beat his child, who made
him strange hectic scenes, and followed him all over the world to
threaten his security, and menace that beautiful and inexplicable
creative instinct that animated him like a holy fire, and set him
apart from his kind; she began to see how it might be with him. She
was still the woman he loved,--she believed that; he was weaker than
she had thought,--that was all, weaker and not so wise. This being
true, she must put aside her own pain and bewilderment, her own
devastating disillusionment, and comfort him, and help him. She rose
from her bed that morning firmly resolved to see him before the day
was