and as she shook her head he did not press
her to eat. He told her that a train for Hampton left in ten minutes. "I
think I'll stay in Boston the rest of the day, as long as I'm here," he
added.

She remembered that she had not thanked him, she took his hand, but he
cut her short.

"It's glad I was to help you," he assured her. "And if there's anything
more I can do, Miss Janet, you'll be letting me know--you'll call on
Johnny Tiernan, won't you?"

He left her at the gate. He had intruded with no advice, he had offered
no comment that she had come downstairs alone, without Lise. His
confidence in her seemed never to have wavered. He had respected, perhaps
partly imagined her feelings, and in spite of these now a sense of
gratitude to him stole over her, mitigating the intensity of their
bitterness. Mr. Tiernan alone seemed stable in a chaotic world. He was a
man.

No sooner was she in the train, however, than she forgot Mr. Tiernan
utterly. Up to the present the mental process of dwelling upon her own
experience of the last three months had been unbearable, but now she was
able to take a fearful satisfaction in the evolving of parallels between
her case and Lise's. Despite the fact that the memories she had cherished
were now become hideous things, she sought to drag them forth and compare
them, ruthlessly, with what must have been the treasures of Lise. Were
her own any less tawdry? Only she, Janet, had been the greater fool of
the two, the greater dupe because she had allowed herself to dream, to
believe that what she had done had been for love, for light! because she
had not listened to the warning voice within her! It had always been on
the little, unpremeditated acts of Ditmar that she had loved to linger,
and now, in the light of Lise's testimony, of Lise's experience, she saw
them all as false. It seemed incredible, now, that she had ever deceived
herself into thinking that Ditmar meant to marry her, that he loved her
enough to make her his wife. Nor was it necessary to summon and marshal
incidents to support this view, they came of themselves, crowding one
another, a cumulative and appalling array of evidence, before which she
stood bitterly amazed at her former stupidity. And in the events of
yesterday, which she pitilessly reviewed, she beheld a deliberate and
prearranged plan for her betrayal. Had he not telephoned to Boston for
the rooms, rehearsed in his own mind every detail of what had
subsequently h