“A little,” Avery admitted.

She was spreading out the small garment on her knee, looking at it critically, with eyes downcast.  She certainly was pale that morning.  The only colour in her face seemed concentrated in her lips.

Mrs. Lorimer looked at her uneasily.  There was something not quite normal about her, she felt.  She had never seen Avery look so statuesque.  She missed the quick sweetness of her smile, the brightness and animation of her glance.

“It is very dear of you to come and see me,” she said gently, after a moment.  “Did you walk all the way?  I hope it hasn’t been too much for you.”

“No,” Avery said.  “It did me good.”

She was on the verge of saying something further, but the words did not come.

She continued to smooth out the little smock with minute care, while Mrs. Lorimer watched her anxiously.

“Is all well, dear?” she ventured at last.

Avery raised her brows slightly, but her eyes remained downcast.  “I went to the wedding yesterday,” she said, after a momentary pause.

“Oh, did you, dear?  Stephen went, but I stayed at home.  Did you see him?”

“Only from a distance,” said Avery.

“It was a very magnificent affair, he tells me.”  Mrs. Lorimer was becoming a little nervous.  She had begun to be conscious of something tragic in the atmosphere.  “And did you enjoy it, dear?  Or was the heat too great?”

“It was hot,” Avery said.

Again she seemed to be about to say something more, and again she failed to do so.  Her lips closed.

Mrs. Lorimer remained silent also for several seconds.  Then softly she rose, went to Avery, put her arms about her.

“My darling!” she said fondly.

That was all.  No further questioning, no anxious probing, simply her love poured out in fullest measure upon the altar of friendship!  And it moved Avery instantly and overwhelmingly, shattering her reserve, sweeping away the stony ramparts of her pride.

She turned and hid her face upon Mrs. Lorimer’s breast in an anguish of tears.

It lasted for several minutes, that paroxysm of weeping.  It was the pent misery of hours finding vent at last.  All she had suffered, all the humiliation, the bitterness of desecrated love, the utter despair of her soul, was in those tears.  They shook her being to the depths.  They seemed to tear her heart asunder.

At last in broken whispers she began to speak.  Still with those scalding tears falling between her words, she imparted the whole miserable story; she bared her fallen pride.  There was no other person in the world to whom she could thus have revealed that inner agony, that lacerating shame.  But Mrs. Lorimer, the despised, the downtrodden, was as an angel from heaven that day.  A new strength was hers, born of her friend’s utter need.  She held her up, she sustained, her, through that the darkest hour of her life, with a courage and a steadfastness of which no one had ever deemed her capable.