“How do you want me to answer that?” the girl asked, slackening her pace a little.  “I’m not Miss Dalstan.”

“From her point of view,” he explained eagerly.  “This man Power is madly and I believe truly in love with her.  In his way he is great; in his way, too, he is a potentate.  He can give her more than luxury, more, even, than success.  You know Elizabeth,” he went on.  “She is one of the finest women who ever breathed, an idealist but a seeker after big things.  She deserves the big things.  Is she more likely to find them with me or with him?”

“Power’s wife is still alive,” she ruminated.

“And won’t accept a divorce at present,” he observed.  “If ever she does, of course he will marry her.  That has to be taken into account not morally but the temporal side of it.  We know perfectly well that whatever Elizabeth decides, she couldn’t possibly do wrong.”

Martha smiled a little grimly.

“That’s what it is to be born in the clouds,” she said.  “There is no sin for a good woman.”

He looked at her appreciatively.

“I wonder how I knew that you would understand this,” he sighed.

Suddenly he clutched at her arm.  She glanced up in surprise.  He was staring at a passer-by.  Her eyes followed his.  In a neat morning suit, with a black bowler hat and well-polished shoes, a cigar in his mouth and a general air of prosperity, Mr. Edward Dane was strolling along Broadway.  He passed without a glance at either of them.  For a moment Philip faltered.  Then he set his teeth and walked on.  There was an ashen shade in his face.  The girl looked at him and shook her head.

“Mr. Ware,” she said, “we haven’t talked much about it, but there is something there behind, isn’t there, something you are terrified about, something that might come, even now?”

“She knows about it,” he interposed quickly.

“Would it be very bad if it came?”

“Hideous!”

“If she were your wife—?”

“She would be notorious.  It would ruin her.”

“Do you think, then,” she asked quietly, “that you needed to come and ask my advice?”

He walked on with his head high, looking upwards with unseeing eyes.  A little vista of that undisturbed supper table on the other side of the marble hall, a dim perspective of those eight years of waiting, flitted through his brain.  The lord of that Fifth Avenue Mansion was in earnest, right enough, and he had so much to offer.

“It will break me if I have to give her up,” he said simply.  “I believe I should have gone overboard, crossing the Atlantic, but for her.”

“There are some women,” she sighed, “the best of all women, the joy of whose life seems to be sacrifice.  That sounds queer, don’t it, but it’s true.  They’re happy in misfortune, so long as they are helping some one else.  She is wonderful, Elizabeth Dalstan.  She may even be one of those.  You’ll find that out.  You’d better find out for yourself.  There isn’t any one can help you very much.”