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united effort to relieve suffering. The arrangement should prove a distraction.

Life was terribly flat for Patricia Weybourn at this time. For her there was no joy in sacrifice. She did not feel that she had done a noble thing in sending her lover back to his wife. She considered, and called herself, a fool. Harley meant life to her—life in all its glorious fulness—and she had thrown it away. For whom? For a woman who, possibly, had lovers of her own. These quiet little women were deep.

Yes, she insisted, she had been a fool. What did she owe to Grace, anyhow? A friendship which she had forgotten for years? Hospitality? What were such little things in a whole life-time?

In her heart she cursed the earthquake and all it entailed. She felt no sympathy with the sufferers. Her own suffering forbade it. The earthquake had robbed her of her chance of happiness. It had raised an eternal barrier between her and the man she loved as she had never thought to love. Had it not occurred she would have been in her lover’s arms at this moment, dreaming of happy years ahead. Nothing else could have moved her to act with a quixotry entirely foreign to her make-up. She would have claimed and held Harley though an army of Graces wept and pleaded their Joans on her threshold.

But, with Grace dead, or injured———! Oh, why had the woman chosen to go to Napier instead of to Auckland, Rotorua, or the South Island?

She was sorry for poor little Grace, of course. Life had not treated Grace fairly. But she should have recognised her limitations—recognised that she was not physically equipped to hold a man like Harley enslaved for life. She had been wrong to use deception to capture and imprison him—the deception of a dependent weakness which no real man could ignore or fail to feel flattered by. If Harley had ever loved her, he must have become merely a husband long since. The two were mismated. Pas-