e
to dinner with me and my husband one evening at Onslow Gardens?"

Julia uttered the words "my husband" with a pleasure which she could
not secrete from the eyes of Marie. Had she not known it, too? Had she
not once delighted in saying, "My husband thinks." ... "My husband
says." ... "My husband does...." simply for the crass joy of hearing
the sound?

Julia went on:

"When can it be? Let's fix a date early. Do, there's a dear! There'll
be a peculiar joy to Desmond and me in having in our own house Osborn
and you, the very two people who always told us the truth about
marriage, and urged us to go and do likewise!"

"The truth?" Marie echoed.

"How wonderful it was!" Julia said sublimely.

As Julia sat there, glowing and content, Marie recognised that she had
forgotten all the sad things she had been told and that only the glory
remained. Julia had harked back to that first year in which the young
Kerrs had chanted together:

"Marriage is the only life."

And separately:

"A woman can be an angel."

"A man a brute? A man's a god."

Julia continued: "To-day's Monday. We're still furnishing, of course,
as I told you, but that won't matter, will it? Can you both come to
dinner on Thursday and see the two happiest people in the world?"

"Edifying as the sight must be--" Marie began with smiling lips. But
then she put the baby down and, covering her face with her hands,
cried bitterly: "Would the two happiest people in the world like to
see the two miserablest people in it?"

While her face was still covered, she felt Julia's arms about her,
heard her disconcerted voice begging to be told. But when at last
Marie looked up, with tears salt and bitter on her cheeks, it was to
reply sombrely:

"There's nothing to tell."

"What has happened?" Julia begged.

Marie said slowly, twisting her hands: "I felt, when I came home,
after a joy-year which he didn't want to give me the remotest chance
of sharing, that--that I could never forgive him for all those years
of losing my health and looks, those years of work and worry and
child-bearing; those years of quarrelling and grudging; those dead,
drab, ugly, ordinary married years. And so...."

"And so, my dear?"

"And so I have not forgiven him. He killed the love in me. There is no
more for him."

"If there is no more," said Julia, with a sudden instinct, "why do you
cry, my dear? And why does this hurt you so?"

"To--to see you so happy," Marie whispered