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“You can’t be,” she said, quite simply.

“Can’t be?” Margaret stammered, with a flushing cheek.

“I mean, it’s some mistake. Are there two Mrs. Robert Ransoms in the same town? Your family arrangements are so extremely puzzling.” She had a farther rush of enlightenment. “Oh, I see! I ought of course to have asked for Mrs. Robert Ransom ‘Junior’!”

The idea sent her to her feet with a haste which showed her impatience to make up for lost time.

“There is no other Mrs. Robert Ransom at Wentworth,” said Margaret.

“No other–no ‘Junior’? Are you sure?” Lady Caroline fell back into her seat again. “Then I simply don’t see,” she murmured helplessly.

Margaret’s blush had fixed itself on her throbbing forehead. She remained standing, while her strange visitor continued to gaze at her with a perturbation in which the consciousness of indiscretion had evidently as yet no part.

“I simply don’t see,” she repeated.

Suddenly she sprang up, and advancing to Margaret laid an inspired hand on her arm. “But, my dear woman, you can help us out all the same; you can help us to find out who it is–and you will, won’t you? Because, as it’s not you, you can’t in the least mind what I’ve been saying–“

Margaret, freeing her arm from her visitor’s hold, drew back a step; but Lady Caroline instantly rejoined her.

“Of course, I can see that if it had been, you might have been annoyed: I dare say I put the case stupidly–but I’m so bewildered by this new development–by his using you all this time as a pretext–that I really don’t know where to turn for light on the mystery–“

She had Margaret in her imperious grasp again, but the latter broke from her with a more resolute gesture.

“I’m afraid I have no light to give you,” she began; but once more Lady Caroline caught her up.

“Oh, but do please understand me! I condemn Guy most strongly for using your name–when we all know you’d been so amazingly kind to him! I haven’t a word to say in his defence–but of course the important thing now is: who is the woman, since you’re not?”

The question rang out loudly, as if all the pale puritan corners of the room flung it back with a shudder at the speaker. In the silence that ensued Margaret felt the blood ebbing back to her heart; then she said, in a distinct and level voice: “I know nothing of the history of Mr. Dawnish.”

Lady Caroline gave a stare and a gasp. Her distracted hand groped for her boa and she began to wind it mechanically about her long neck.

“It would really be an enormous help to us–and to poor Gwendolen Matcher,” she persisted pleadingly. “And you’d be doing Guy himself a good turn.”

Margaret remained silent and motionless while her visitor drew on one of the worn gloves she had pulled off to adjust her veil. Lady Caroline gave the veil a final twitch.

“I’ve come a tremendously long way,” she said, “and, since it isn’t you, I can’t think why you won’t help me. . . .”

When the door had closed on her visitor Margaret Ransom went slowly up the stairs to her room. As she dragged her feet from one step to another, she remembered how she had sprung up the same steep flight after that visit of Guy Dawnish’s when she had looked in the glass and seen on her face the blush of youth.

When she reached her room she bolted the door as she had done that day, and again looked at herself in the narrow mirror above her dressing-table. It was just a year since then–the elms were budding again, the willows hanging their green veil above the bench by the river. But there was no trace of youth left in her face–she saw it now as others had doubtless always seen it. If it seemed as it did to Lady Caroline Duckett, what look must it have worn to the fresh gaze of young Guy Dawnish?

A pretext–she had been a pretext. He had used her name to screen some one else–or perhaps merely to escape from a situation of which he was weary. She did not care to conjecture what his motive had been–everything connected with him had grown so remote and alien. She felt no anger–only an unspeakable sadness, a sadness which she knew would never be appeased.

She looked at herself long and steadily; she wished to clear her eyes of all illusions. Then she turned away and took her usual seat beside her work-table. From where she sat she could look down the empty elm-shaded street, up which, at this hour every day, she was sure to see her husband’s figure advancing. She would see it presently–she would see it for many years to come. She had a sudden aching sense of the length of the years that stretched before her. Strange that one who was not young should still, in all likelihood, have so long to live!

Nothing was changed in the setting of her life, perhaps nothing would ever change in it. She would certainly live and die in Wentworth. And meanwhile the days would go on as usual, bringing the usual obligations. As the word flitted through her brain she remembered that she had still to put the finishing touches to the paper she was to read the next afternoon at the meeting of the Higher Thought Club.

The book she had been reading lay face downward beside her, where she had left it an hour ago. She took it up, and slowly and painfully, like a child laboriously spelling out the syllables, she went on with the rest of the sentence:

–“and they spring from a level not much above that of the springing of the transverse and diagonal ribs, which are so arranged as to give a convex curve to the surface of the vaulting conoid.”