"Listen to me," she said. "His people haven't the clues to connect a Phemie Watson they never heard of with Adelaide Fish. You'll have the start of them. Make your terms; make your terms before James and I go to housekeeping again.... I daresay he'd never find it out for himself. About that divorce—it was never fixed. The lawyer wanted to go duck-shooting, and I was gone, and James,—why, they're unbusiness-like, these poets!—he says he had always hugged an inextinguishable spark——"
She paused, looking impatiently at her listener, who was so silent.
"Don't you understand?" she said. "I'm no more Mrs. John Barnabas Hill than you are. If you're wise you'll make him marry you to-morrow."
*****
Susan did not know which way to turn when she was in the street. It seemed much darker; it seemed as if she were lost.
She walked blindly on and on. The people were ghosts that were streaming by; their faces that gleamed and passed did not lighten her terrible loneliness. A straw in that human river, she was afraid.
There was a post-office on the other side of the street. She almost ran to it, unconscious of the swift perils of the crossing.
For she must write to Barnaby, and the thought of communicating with him, poignant as it was, had a strange touch of comfort. The bare office became a harbour.
They gave her a letter card, and she wrote at the counter, with the scratching office pen. That was why it was so ill written. It was ridiculous how such a trifle hurt her. Was it not the first and last time she would ever write to him, and did it matter how badly, since it was to tell him that there was no bar between him and Julia? ...
He would be glad to have it....