“Damn the fellow!” Wingate muttered.

“Naturally,” she continued, “I declined to sleep under the same roof.  The woman remained—­and here am I.”

“You are here,” he repeated.  “Thank God for that!”

“It was perhaps imprudent of me,” she sighed, “to choose this hotel, but I had a curious feeling of weakness.  I felt that I must see some one to whom I could tell what had happened—­some friend—­before I slept.  Perhaps my nerves are going.  So I came to you.  Did I do wrong?”

“The wrong would be if ever you left me,” he declared passionately.

She patted his hand.  “Dear friend!”

“The room I will arrange for in a minute or two,” he promised.  “That is quite easy.  But to-morrow—­what then?”

“I shall telephone home,” she replied.  “If that woman is still in the house, I shall go down into the country, and from there I shall write my lawyers and apply for a separation.”

“So those are your plans,” he remarked calmly.

“Yes.  Can you suggest anything better?”

“I can suggest something a thousand times better.”

She hesitated for a moment.  Perhaps she was conscious of a certain alteration in his deportment, the ring of his last words, the slight but unusual air of emotional fervour with which he seemed somehow to have become endowed.  A woman of curiously strong virginal instincts, she realised, perhaps for the first time, the approach of a great change in Wingate’s attitude towards her.  Yet she could not keep from her lips the words which must bring his avowal.

“What do you mean?” she faltered.

“That you end it all,” he advised firmly, “that you take your courage in both hands, that you do not return to your husband at all.”

“Not return,” she repeated, her eyes held by his.

“That you come to me,” he went on, bending over the side of her chair.  “Needless, wonderful words, but I love you.  You were the first woman in my life.  You will be the last.  I have been silent, as you know.  I have waited for something like this, and I think the time has come.”

“The time can never come,” she cried despairingly.

“The time has come at least for me to tell you that I love you more than any woman on earth,” he declared, “that I want to take care of you, to take you into my life, to build a wall of passionate devotion around you, to keep you free from every trouble and every harm.”

“Ah, dear friend, if it were but possible!” she murmured, holding his hands tightly.

“But it is possible,” he insisted.  “All that we need is courage.  You owe nothing to your husband.  You can leave him without remorse or a moment’s shame.  Your life just now is wasted,—­a precious human life.  I want you, Josephine.  God knows how I want you!”

“You have my friendship—­even my love.  There, I have said it!” she repeated, with a little sob, “my love.”