"I did not ask you to give her up," she said. "I do not take the world's view of such things."
He looked at her with an incredible incredulous relief.
"You angel mother!" he said with a deep sigh. "I might have trusted you. There is one thing. Stella must never know."
"She must never know," she repeated after him.
Her husband's foot sounded in the adjoining room and Terry went away comforted. Shawn did not come in to say good-night to her as usual, by which omission she conjectured the trouble of his mind. She prayed for light, almost in despair of finding it, and slept, although she had expected to lie awake, seeking unhappily a way out of this threatening sorrow for all dear to her.
She awoke somewhere in the small hours. The moon was on her bed and the air was very cold. She came awake suddenly, with a thought in her mind so concrete that it was as though some one had spoken it aloud.
"Is it quite certain that Terence did not marry Bridyeen Sweeney?"
She caught at it as a drowning man catches at a straw. Her heart gave a wild bound towards it. It was so thin, so frail a hope, that while her fingers closed upon it she knew the futility. Again she slept, and the thought was with her when she awoke in the grey morning.