‘We have known each other a long time,’ I ventured.

‘There was no one else I could come to,’ she said.

Her whole frame was shaking.  I sat up, and asked her to pass my dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders.  Then I rang the bell.

‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded fearfully.

’I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and then we will talk.

Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair.  You’ll be more yourself after a cup of tea.’

How young I was then!  I remember my naive satisfaction in this exhibition of tact.  I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be—­hard in spite of the compassion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for her.  And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I regretted the delay, and I suffered by it.  Surely, I thought, she will read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there.  But she did not.  She was one of the simplest of women.  In ten thousand women one is born without either claws or second-sight.  She was that one, defenceless as a rabbit.

‘You are very kind to me,’ she said, putting her cup on the mantelpiece with a nervous rattle; ‘and I need it.’

‘Tell me,’ I murmured.  ‘Tell me—­what I can do.’

I had remained in bed; she was by the fireplace.  A distance between us seemed necessary.

‘You can’t do anything, my dear,’ she said.  ’Only I was obliged to talk to someone, after all the night.  It’s about Frank.’

‘Mr. Ispenlove!’ I ejaculated, acting as well as I could, but not very well.

‘Yes.  He has left me.’

‘But why?  What is the matter?’

Even to recall my share in this interview with Mary Ispenlove humiliates me.  But perhaps I have learned the value of humiliation.  Still, could I have behaved differently?

‘You won’t understand unless I begin a long time ago,’ said Mary Ispenlove.  ’Carlotta, my married life has been awful—­awful—­a tragedy.  It has been a tragedy both for him and for me.  But no one has suspected it; we have hidden it.’

I nodded.  I, however, had suspected it.

‘It’s just twenty years—­yes, twenty—­since I fell in love,’ she proceeded, gazing at me with her soft, moist eyes.

‘With—­Frank,’ I assumed.  I lay back in bed.

‘No,’ she said.  ’With another man.  That was in Brixton, when I was a girl living with my father; my mother was dead.  He was a barrister—­I mean the man I was in love with.  He had only just been called to the Bar.  I think everybody knew that I had fallen in love with him.  Certainly he did; he could not help seeing it.  I could not conceal it.  Of course I can understand now that it flattered him.  Naturally it did.  Any man is flattered when a woman falls in love with him.  And my father was rich, and so on, and so on.  We saw each other a lot.  I hoped, and