country client, and there she was on
the stage."

"Oh!" cried Frederica--a muffled, barely audible cry of passionate
sympathy. Then:

"Roddy," she demanded, "are you sure it's true? Are you absolutely sure
that it's really Rose? Or if it is, that she's in her right mind--that
she hasn't just wandered off as people do sometimes without knowing who
they are?"

"There's nothing in that notion," he said. "It's Rose all right, and she
knows what she's doing."

"You mean you've seen her off the stage--talked with her?"

He nodded.

She pulled in a long sigh of anticipatory relief.

"Well, then," she demanded, "what did she say? How did she explain how
she _could_ have done such a thing as that?"

"I didn't ask her to explain," said Rodney. "I asked her to come home,
and she wouldn't."

"Oh, it's wicked!" she cried. "It's the most abominably selfish thing I
ever heard of!"

He made a gesture of protest, but it didn't stop her.

"Oh, I suppose," she flashed, "she didn't _mean_ any harm--wasn't just
trying to do the cruelest thing she could to you. But it would be a
little less infuriating if she had."

"Pull up, Freddy!" he said. Rather gently though, for him. "There's no
good going on like that. And besides ... You were saying Harriet would
do anything in the world for me. Well, there's something _you_ can do.
You're the only person I know who can."

Her answer was to come around behind his chair, put her cheek down
beside his, and reach for his hands.

"Let's get away from this miserable breakfast table," she said. "Come up
to where I live, where we can be safely by ourselves; then tell me about
it."

In front of her boudoir fire, looking down on her as she sat in her
flowered wing chair, an enormously distended rug-covered pillow beside
her knees waiting for him to drop down on when he felt like it, he began
rather cautiously to tell her what he wanted.

"I'll tell you the reason why I've come to you," he began, "and then
you'll see. Do you remember nearly two years ago, the night I got wet
coming down here to dinner--the night you were going to marry me off to
Hermione Woodruff? We had a long talk afterward, and you said, speaking
of the chances people took getting married, that it wasn't me you
worried about, but the girl, whoever she might be, who married me."

The little gesture she made admitted the recollection, but denied its
relevancy. She'd have said something to that effect, but he prevented