he men whom fate had marked for
their caring; and in a sudden flash of vision I knew, too, that Burton,
no matter what Bessie Lowe or any other girl had ever been to him,
worshiped his wife with an intensity of devotion that would make all his
days one long reparation for whatever wrong he might have done her. I
knew, though, that, if he had done the wrong, she would never again be
able to give him the eager love he desired, and I, too, an unwilling
spectator, waited on his words for his future, and Leila's; but his
voice did not make answer. It was Dick Allport who spoke.

"Bessie Lowe is a girl I used to care for," he said. "She is the girl
who sang at the Musicians' Club, the girl who spoke to you. She heard
that I was going to be married. She wanted me to come back to her. I
refused."

He was standing in the shadow, looking neither at Leila nor at me, but
at Standish Burton. Burton turned to him.

"Yes," he muttered thickly, "they told me to tell you. They knew you'd
be here."

"I see," said Leila. She looked at Standish and then at Dick Allport,
and there came into her eyes a queer, glazed stare that filmed their
brightness. "I am sorry that I asked questions, Mr. Allport, about
something that was nothing to me. Will you forgive me?"

"There is nothing to be forgiven," he said. He turned to her and smiled
a little. She tried to answer his smile, but a gasp came from her
instead.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said, "so sorry for her!"

It was Standish's gaze that brought to me sudden realization that I,
too, had a part in the drama. Until I found his steady stare on me I had
felt apart from the play that he and Dick and Leila were going through,
but with his urgent glare I awoke into knowledge that the message he had
taken for Dick held for me the same significance that Leila had thought
it bore for her. Like a stab from a knife came the thought that this
girl--whoever she was--had, in her dying, done what she had not done in
life, taken Dick Allport from me. There went over me numbing waves of a
great sense of loss, bearing me out on an ocean of oblivion. Against
these I fought desperately to hold myself somewhere near the shore of
sensibility. As if I were beholding him from a great distance, I could
see Dick standing in the lamplight in front of Leila Burton.
Understanding of how dear he was to me, of how vitally part of me he had
grown in the years through which I had loved him--sometimes lightly,
sometimes