performance was fairly under way. Norma rustled into a
seat beside her companion without moving her eyes from the coloured
comedian on the stage; she could remove hat and gloves and jacket
without losing an instant of him.

When the lights went up Wolf approved the dark hair and the pearls, and
bent toward her to hear the unending confidences. Norma thought she had
never seen anything better, and even Wolf admitted that it was a good
show. They finished the peppermints, and were very happy.

They had seen the big film, and so could cut the last third of the
programme, and reach home at ten o'clock. There was no comment from Aunt
Kate, who was yawning over the evening paper in the dining-room. Rose
and Harry were murmuring in the dimly lighted parlour. Wolf, who was of
the slow-thinking, intense type that discovers a new world every time it
reads a new book, was halfway through a shabby library copy of "War and
Peace," and went off to his room with the second volume under his arm.
Norma went to her room, too, but she sat dreaming before the mirror,
thinking of that Melrose house, and of Leslie's friendliness, until Rose
came in at eleven o'clock.

CHAPTER III

At almost this same moment Norma's self was the subject of a rather
unusual talk between Christopher Liggett and his wife.

Christopher had come softly into his house, at about half-past ten, to
find Alice awake, still on the big couch before her fire. Her little
bedroom beyond was softly lighted, the white bed turned down, and the
religious books she always read before going to sleep laid in place by
Miss Slater. But Alice had no light except her fire and two or three
candles in old sconces.

She welcomed Christopher with a smile, and he sat down, in his somewhat
rumpled evening dress, and smiled back at her in a rather weary fashion.
He often told her that these rooms of hers were a sanctuary, that he
tested the men and women he met daily in the world by her fine and lofty
standard. It was part of his utter generosity to her that he talked to
her as frankly as if he thought aloud, and it was Alice's pride and joy
to know that this marriage of theirs, which had so sadly and suddenly
become no marriage at all, was not as one-sided as the world might have
suspected. Her clear, dispassionate viewpoint and her dignified
companionship were not wifehood, but they were dear and valuable to him
none the less, a part of his life that he would not have spared.