"Still, yes," agreed Scanlon, "but I'm not so sure about the wonderful."

She smiled at him.

"If you were quite sure of that," she said, "you wouldn't be nearly so nice." Her great mass of bronze hair was loosely arranged about her head, and against the delicate blue of a pillow it shone like red gold in the light of the reading lamp. "I'm so glad it is Sunday," she went on, "and that I am not to play to-night. For I'm tired, Bat, more tired than you'd believe."

"I'd believe it, no matter how strong you made it," said he. "What you've gone through has been enough to tire any one."

She reached out and patted his hand gently as it rested upon the arm of his chair.

"Bat, you are so big and strong that you seem to give out sympathy naturally. And that is a quality which all women like." She paused a moment; her white, strong, beautifully-modeled fingers trifled with the bracelet of raw gold; her eyes were bright as though with tears, and there was a sad little smile about the corners of her mouth. "And it is so easy for a woman to be mistaken in men," she proceeded. "In the end she always selects and holds to one, and she is apt to judge all the others by him.—If he is weak, she feels that all men are weak; if he is strong, they are all strong. And if he is cruel and mean and selfish, she feels a desire to hate them all—and sometimes she does!"

Bat nodded his head slowly and wisely.

"Sure," he said. "That's to be expected. But in the end," hopefully, "her mind often clears up on that point. She finds, if she gives herself the chance, that there is really a big difference between them."

"You have some idea what my experience has been in the last five years or so," she said. "It has not been beautiful, Bat; it has, at times, been hideously ugly; and the tears I have wept and the things I have borne and the vows I have made have been very many. There have been times when I could think only of death, so completely humbled have I felt, so without spirit, so utterly in Tom Burton's power. I have told you something of his slimy plots, of his detestable innuendoes. He knew of my loathing of the divorce courts, and my fear of scandal, no matter how unfounded, and played upon them constantly, feeling sure that in the end I would meet his demands."

"But that's all over, Nora," said Bat. "It all belongs to the past. Try to forget it."