have married, the woman whose place I had taken, the woman of the
foolscap document and the letters in the purple ribbon.

After that I could play my poor little part no longer, and though I
continued to lean on the yellow velvet of the barrier in front of me I
dropped my eyes as often as that woman was on the stage, and hoped and
prayed for the end of the performance.

It came at length with a crash of instruments and voices, and a few
minutes afterwards my husband and I were in the cab on our way back to
the hotel.

I was choking with mingled anger and shame--anger at my husband for
permitting me to come to a place in which I could be exposed to a public
affront from his cast-off mistress, shame at the memory of the pitiful
scheme for entering into his life which had fallen to such a welter of
wreck and ruin.

But my husband himself was only choking with laughter.

"It was as good as a play," he said. "Upon my soul it was! I never saw
anything funnier in the whole course of my life."

That served him, repeated again and again, until we reached the hotel,
when he ordered a bottle of wine to be sent upstairs, and then shook
with suppressed laughter as we went up in the lift.

Coming to our floor I turned towards my bedroom, wishing to be alone
with my outraged feelings, but my husband drew me into one of our
sitting-rooms, telling me he had something to say.

He put me to sit in an arm-chair, threw off his overcoat, lit a
cigarette, as well as he could for the spurts and gusts of his laughter,
and then, standing back to the fire-place, with one hand in his pocket
and his coat-tail over his arm, he told me the cause of his merriment.

"I don't mind telling you that was Lena," he said. "The good-looking
girl in the scarlet dress and the big diamonds. She spotted me the
moment she stepped on to the stage. Must have guessed who you were, too.
Did you see how she looked at you? Thought I had brought you there to
walk over her. I'm sure she did!"

There was another gust of laughter and then--

"She'd been going about saying I had married an old frump for the sake
of her fortune, and when she saw that you could wipe her off the face of
the earth without a gown that was worth wearing, she was ready to die
with fury."

There was another gust of laughter through the smoke that was spurting
from his mouth and then--

"And you, too, my dear! Laughing and applauding! She thought you were
trying to crow over her! On h