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She thought he meant to speak, but no words came. Then, after a pause, with a brief “good night,” he passed out on to the dimly-lighted pavement.

So that was over! Ann came back into the showroom, and took up Dick Holmes’s letter which lay open on the table amongst the disordered hat-stands.

She was very tired. The scene with Rodney seemed to have bereft her of all vitality. But she went back to her writing-table to begin her letter to Vera Holmes. For a long time she sat gazing down at the blank sheet of paper before her. How difficult to express in words all that she wished to say! It was true, as she had told Rodney, that she was not uncharitable in her thoughts of other women. Young as she was, she realized the latent power of passion in herself, and though she turned with a sense of sick distaste from the contemplation of Vera’s secret, yet she understood a little the strength of the temptation to which the older woman had yielded in beginning this intrigue with Gerald Waring. Vera had not married the right man. She needed a strong, ruthlessly masculine mate to dominate, and hold her. Holmes was too sensitive and self-effacing to interest her for long. His finer qualities—the gentle consideration for others—she had unconsciously grown to despise as weakness. But though she recognized this, Ann still was of stern enough stuff to hate the sin of disloyalty of which Vera had been guilty. Disloyalty, not only to her husband, but to her children, and in a lesser degree to Ann herself. To hurt others—to betray them—that seemed to Ann the essence of immorality.