the fevers and heartaches of this memorable
week? Her innocent allusion to the night of their walk--only a week
ago!--brought Martie an actual pang.

For just one other such evening, for just one more talk, Martie was
beginning to feel she would go mad. They had said so little then, they
had known so little what this new separation would mean!

And Sally knew nothing of it. A sudden lonely blankness fell upon
Martie's soul; it mattered nothing to Lydia and Rose and Sally that
John Dryden loved her. It mattered more than life to her.

What use to talk of it? How flat the words would seem for that memory
of everything high and splendid. Yet she felt the need of speech. She
must talk of him to some one, now when it was too late: when he was out
on the ocean: when she was perhaps never to see him again.

"Sis," she said, setting the filled plate in the centre of the table,
"do you specially remember him?"

Sally had chanced to come to the old home for just a minute on the
morning of her talk with John in the garden. Sally nodded now alertly.

"Certainly I do! He seemed a dear," she said cordially.

"I wish they had not come!" Martie said sombrely.

"You--wish--?" Sally's anxious eyes flashed to her face.

"That they had never come!"

"Oh, Mart! Oh, Mart, why?"

"Because--because I think perhaps I should not marry Cliff, feeling as
I do to John!" Martie said desperately.

She had not quite meant it when she said it: her sick heart was merely
trying to reach Sally's concern, it frightened her now to feel that it
was almost true.

"WHAT!" Sally whispered.

She was roused now: too much roused. Martie began hastily to reassure
Sally, and herself, too.

"Oh, I will, Sally. Of course I will. And nobody will ever know this
except you and me!"

"Martie, dear, he DOES care then?"

"Oh, yes, he cares!"

"But, Mart--that's terrible!"

Martie laughed ruefully.

"It's miserable!" she agreed, her eyes watering even while she smiled.

"He knew about Cliff?" Sally questioned.

"Oh, yes!"

"And his own wife is alive?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Well, then?" Sally concluded anxiously. "What does he want--what does
he expect you to do?"

To this Martie only answered unhappily:

"I don't know."

Sally, staring at her in distress, was silent. But as Martie suddenly
seemed to put the subject aside, and called the children for supper,
she turned back to the stove in relief. Presently they were all
gathered about the kitc