“I need the money—I must have it for my baby. Or else they’ll send it to an Institution.” She paused. “But that’s not all. I want to marry—to be a wife, like all of you. I should have loved Jo{38}e’s children—our children. Life doesn’t stop....”

{38}

“No; I suppose not. But you speak as if ... as if ... the person who took advantage of you....”

“No one took advantage of me. I was lonely and unhappy. I met some one who was lonely and unhappy. People don’t all have your luck. We were both too poor to marry each other ... and mother would never have consented. And so one day ... one day before he said goodbye....”

“He said goodbye?”

“Yes. He was going to leave the country.”

“He left the country—knowing?”

“How was he to know? He doesn’t live here. He’d just come back—come back to see his family—for a few weeks....{39}”

{39}

She broke off, her thin lips pressed together upon her secret.

There was a silence. Blindly Delia stared at the bold shepherd.

“Come back from where?” she asked at length in a low tone.

“Oh, what does it matter? You wouldn’t understand,” Charlotte broke off, in the very words her married cousin had compassionately addressed to her virginity.

A slow blush rose to Delia’s cheek: she felt oddly humiliated by the rebuke conveyed in that contemptuous retort. She seemed to herself shy, ineffectual, as incapable as an ignorant girl of dealing with the abominations that Charlotte was thrusting on her. But suddenly some fierce feminine intuition struggled and woke in her. She forced her eyes upon her cousin’s.{40}

{40}

“You won’t tell me who it was?”

“What’s the use? I haven’t told anybody.”

“Then why have you come to me?”

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