When she heard her husband’s footstep on the porch, she put out her light, but still lay thinking in the darkness.  Her revelations had arrived at the uncomfortable stage where they began to frighten her, and with an effort she forced herself to turn to the other side of the account.  The hour was conducive to exaggerations.  Perfection in husbands was evidently a state not to be considered by any woman in her right senses.  He was more or less amenable, and he was prosperous, although definite news of that prosperity never came from him—­Quicksands always knew of it first.  An instance of this second-hand acquisition of knowledge occurred the very next morning, when Lily Dallam, with much dignity, walked into Honora’s little sitting-room.  There was no apparent reason why dignity should not have been becoming to Lily Dallam, for she was by no means an unimpressive-looking woman; but the assumption by her of that quality always made her a little tragic or (if one chanced to be in the humour—­Honora was not) a little ridiculous.

“I suppose I have no pride,” she said, as she halted within a few feet of the doorway.

“Why, Lily!” exclaimed Honora, pushing back the chair from her desk, and rising.

But Mrs. Dallam did not move.

“I suppose I have no pride,” she repeated in a dead voice, “but I just couldn’t help coming over and giving you a chance.”

“Giving me a chance?” said Honora.

“To explain—­after the way you treated me at the polo game.  If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I shouldn’t have believed it.  I don’t think I should have trusted my own eyes,” Mrs. Dallam went so far as to affirm, “if Lula Chandos and Clara Trowbridge and others hadn’t been there and seen it too; I shouldn’t have believed it.”

Honora was finding penitence a little difficult.  But her heart was kind.

“Do sit down, Lily,” she begged.  “If I’ve offended you in any way, I’m exceedingly sorry—­I am, really.  You ought to know me well enough to understand that I wouldn’t do anything to hurt your feelings.”

“And when I counted on you so, for my tea and dinner at the club!” continued Mrs. Dallam.  “There were other women dying to come.  And you said you had a headache, and were tired.”

“I was,” began Honora, fruitlessly.

“And you were so popular in Quicksands—­everybody was crazy about you.  You were so sweet and so unspoiled.  I might have known that it couldn’t last.  And now, because Abby Kame and Cecil Grainger and—­”

“Lily, please don’t say such things!” Honora implored, revolted.

“Of course you won’t be satisfied now with anything less than Banbury or Newport.  But you can’t say I didn’t warn you, Honora, that they are a horrid, selfish, fast lot,” Lily Dallam declared, and brushed her eyes with her handkerchief.  “I did love you.”

“If you’ll only be reasonable a moment, Lily,—­” said Honora.

“Reasonable!  I saw you with my own eyes.  Five minutes after you left me they all started for your house, and Lula Chandos said it was the quickest cure of a headache she had ever seen.”