"Go ahead," MacRae encouraged.
"When Norman Gower went overseas we were engaged," she said bluntly, and stopped. She was not looking at MacRae now. She stared at the opposite wall, her fingers locked together in her lap.
"For four years," she went on, "I've been hoping, dreaming, waiting, loving. To-day he came home to tell me that he married in England two years ago. Married in the madness of a drunken hour—that is how he puts it—a girl who didn't care for anything but the good time his rank and pay could give her."
"I think you're in luck," MacRae said soberly.
"What queer creatures men are!" She seemed not to have heard him—to be thinking her own thoughts out loud. "He says he loves me, that he has loved me all the time, that he feels as if he had been walking in his sleep and fallen into some muddy hole. And I believe him. It's terrible, Johnny."
"It's impossible," MacRae declared savagely. "If he's got in that kind of a hole, let him stay there. You're well out of it. You ought to be glad."
"But I'm not," she said sadly. "I'm not made that way. I can't let a thing become a vital part of my life and give it up without a pang."
"I don't see what else you can do," MacRae observed. "Only brace up and forget it."
"It isn't quite so simple as that," she sighed. "Norman's w—this woman presently got tired of him. Evidently she had no scruples about getting what she wanted, nor how. She went away with another man. Norman is getting a divorce—the decree absolute will be granted in March next. He wants me to marry him."