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“Henry,” said his wife, “you do not see we have a visitor.”

He took off his hat, and perceiving a young lady, waved her a gallant and playful greeting, assuming her to be a neighbor. Miss Benedet stepped back without speaking.

“God bless me!” said Thorne simply, when his wife had named their guest, and so left the matter, for Miss Benedet to acknowledge or deny their earlier meeting.

Mrs. Thorne gave her little coughing laugh.

“Well, you two!” she said with ghastly gayety. “Must I repeat, Henry, that this is”–

“He is trying to think where he has seen me before,” said Helen Benedet. There was a ring in her voice like that of the stamp-heads on the bare steel.

“I am wondering if you remember where you saw me before,” Thorne retorted. He did not like the young lady’s presence there. He thought it extraordinary and rather brazen. And he liked still less to be drawn into a woman’s parlance.

Mrs. Thorne sat still, trembling. “Henry, tell her! Speak to her!”

Miss Benedet turned from husband to wife. Her face was very pale. “Ah,” she said, “you knew about me all the time! He has told you everything–and you called me ‘my dear’! Is it easy for you to say such things?”

“Never mind, never mind! What did you wish to say to me? What was it?”

“Give me a moment, please! This alters everything. I must get accustomed to this before we go any further.”

She reached out her white arm with the thin sleeve wrinkled over it, and helped herself again to water. In every gesture there was the poise and distinction of perfect self-command, a highly wrought self-consciousness, as far removed from pose as from Nature’s simplicity. Natural she could never be again. No woman is natural who has a secret experience to guard, whether of grief or shame, her own or of any belonging to her.

“You are the very man,” she said, “the one who would not promise. And you kept your word and told your wife. And how long have you known of–of this engagement?”

Mr. Thorne looked at his wife.

“Only a few days,” she said.

“Still, there has been time,” the girl reflected. She let her voice fall from its high society pitch. “I did not dream there was so much mercy in the world–among parents! You both knew, and you have not told him. You deserve to have Willy for your son!”

Mrs. Thorne leaned forward to speak. Her husband, guessing what trouble her conscience would be making her, forestalled the effort with a warning look. “There was no mercy in the case,” he bluntly said; “we do not know your story.”

Miss Benedet continued, as if thinking aloud: “Yet you gave me that supreme trust, that I would tell him myself! I have not, and now it is too late. Now I can never know how he would have taken it had he known in time. I do not want his forgiveness, you may be sure, or his toleration. I must be what I was to him or nothing. You will tell him, and then he will understand the letter I wrote him last night, breaking the engagement. We may be honest with each other now; there is no peace of the family to provide for. This night’s talk, and I leave myself, my whole self, with you, to do with as you think best for him. If you think better to have it over at one blow, tell him the worst. The facts are enough if you leave out the excuses. But if you want to soften it for the sake of his faith in general,–isn’t there some such idea, that men lose their faith in all women through the fault of one?–why, soften it all you like. Make me the victim of circumstances. I can show you how. I had forgiven myself, you know. I thought I was as good as new. I had forgotten I had a flaw. And I was so tired of being on the defensive. Now at last, I said, I shall have a friend! You know– do you know what a restful, impersonal manner your son has? What quiet eyes! We rode and talked together like two young men. It seems a pleasure common enough with some girls, but I never had it; lads of my own age were debarred when I was a girl. I had neither girls nor boys to play with. Girl friends were dealt out to me to fit my supposed needs, but taken that way as medicine I didn’t find them very interesting. If I clung to one more than another, that one was not asked soon again for fear of inordinate affections and unbalanced enthusiasms. I was to be an all-around young woman; so they built a wall all around me. It fitted tight at last, and then I broke through one night and emptied my heart on the ground. My plea, you see, is always ready. Could I have lived and kept on scorning myself as I did that night? Do you remember?” She bent her imperative, clears gaze upon Thorne. “I told you the truth when you gave me a chance to lie. Heaven knows what it cost to say, ‘I came with him of my own free will!'”