In spite of his high resolve to hold himself in restraint, until the law had pronounced him free, he had not done so. As long as there had been hope that he might go to Helen unentangled, some day, he remained silent. But when that hope had grown faint, had all but disappeared, brokenly, despairingly, one day, he had confessed his love to her. That was a month ago. His confession had acted like a lighted match on paper. Once Stephen revealed himself to Helen, her love for him, long concealed, but long realized, flashed into flame, like the combustion of a long-stifled fire once it is given air.

As she sat beside him on the sofa, tonight, her arm thrust through his, she observed with fierce pity his drooping shoulders, his hand lying limp and inert upon his knee. She placed her own on top of it and grasped it hard.

“Never mind, Stephen.”

“There’s no hope.”

“I know. We scarcely expected it so soon.”

“Oh, it’s final, Helen.”

There was a pause.

“Do you care to tell me about it?”

Stephen shook his head. It seemed to him sacrilege to bring even the image he had of Stella in his mind into this room. So long as he remained in Helen’s presence, he wished he might erase from his brain the memory of the interview he had just had with the woman who had one day been his wife. (Was it possible that she had one day been his wife?) Stephen closed his eyes an instant. Stella, powdered, painted, perfumed, coarsened in speech and manner as he didn’t suppose it possible, her fattened figure covered with cheap trappings from head to toe, flashed into his field of vision. He looked down at Helen’s lovely hand. Stella and Helen were as unlike as a wax figure, with highly colored cheeks, glass eyes, and blond hair, is unlike a statue of a beautiful Diana carved in white marble.

“You saw her?”

“Yes, I saw her.”

There was another pause.

Gently Helen withdrew her arm and got up. Of course as long as she sat so close to Stephen he could not talk to her. She shoved up her little armchair opposite him and sat down in it.

“Now, Stephen, tell me about it.”

Tell her about it? Repeat to her the threat Stella had hurled at him? No! Helen must never surmise that her fair name had been mentioned, even by an unscrupulous lawyer as a correspondent in a divorce case. For such had been the nature of Stella’s threat.

It had been torture to Stephen to sit in Stella’s presence and listen to her using Helen’s name familiarly, daring to refer to her in the same breath that she referred to Alfred Munn. Stephen closed his eyes again an instant. He could hear Stella still. Her speech had grown terribly crude with the years.