ing at me with furious resentment. "So
you thought as how you'd come here," she demanded of me, her crimsoned
face close to my own, "to see what she was like, to see what sort of a
girl had him before you took him away from her? Well, I'll tell you
something, and you can forget it or remember it, as you like. Bessie
Lowe was a good girl until she ran into him, and she'd have stayed good,
I tell you, if he'd let her alone. She was a fool, though, and she
thought that he'd marry her some day--and all the time he was only
waiting until you'd take him! You never think of our kind, do you, when
you're living out your lives, wondering if you care enough to marry the
men who're worshipping you while they're playing with us? Well, perhaps
it won't be anything to you, but, all the same, there's some kind of a
God, and if He's just He'll punish you when He punishes Standish
Burton!"

"But I--" I gasped. "Did you think that I--?"

"Aren't you his wife?" She came near to me, peering at me in the
flickering candle-light. "Aren't you Standish Burton's wife?"

"No," I said.

"Oh, well"--she shrugged--"you're her sort, and it'll come to the same
thing in the end."

She slouched back to the corner, all anger gone from her. Outside I
heard Dick's voice, low, decisive. Swiftly I followed the girl. "You
must tell me," I pleaded with her, "if she did it because of Standish
Burton."

"I thought everybody knew that," she said, "even his wife. What's it to
you, if you're not that?"

"Nothing," I replied, but I knew, as I stood where she kept vigil with
Bessie Lowe, that I lied. For I saw the truth in a lightning-flash; and
I knew, as I had not known when Dick perjured himself in Leila's
music-room, that I had come to the place of ultimate understanding, for
I realized that not a dead girl, but a living woman, had come between
us. Not Bessie Lowe, but Leila Burton, lifted the sword at the gateway
of my paradise.

With the poignancy of a poisoned arrow reality came to me. Because Dick
had loved Leila Burton he had laid his bond with me on the altar of his
chivalry. For her sake he had sacrificed me to the hurt to which
Standish would not sacrifice her. And the joke of it--the pity of it was
that she hadn't believed them! But because she was Burton's wife,
because it was too late for facing of the truth, she had pretended to
believe Dick; and she had known, she must have known, that he had lied
to her because he loved her.

The humil