“That’s the trouble.”  Indiana shed on her a gaze of cold compassion.  “It’s not that any one has turned him against you.  It’s worse than that—­”

“What can be?”

“You’ll hate me if I tell you.”

“Then you’d better make him tell me himself!”

“I can’t.  I tried to.  The trouble is that it was you—­something you did, I mean.  Something he found out about you—­”

Undine, to restrain a spring of anger, had to clutch both arms of her chair.  “About me?  How fearfully false!  Why, I’ve never even looked at anybody—!”

“It’s nothing of that kind.”  Indiana’s mournful head-shake seemed to deplore, in Undine, an unsuspected moral obtuseness.  “It’s the way you acted to your own husband.”

“I—­my—­to Ralph?  He reproaches me for that?  Peter Van Degen does?” “Well, for one particular thing.  He says that the very day you went off with him last year you got a cable from New York telling you to come back at once to Mr. Marvell, who was desperately ill.”

“How on earth did he know?” The cry escaped Undine before she could repress it.

“It’s true, then?” Indiana exclaimed.  “Oh, Undine—­”

Undine sat speechless and motionless, the anger frozen to terror on her lips.

Mrs. Rolliver turned on her the reproachful gaze of the deceived benefactress.  “I didn’t believe it when he told me; I’d never have thought it of you.  Before you’d even applied for your divorce!”

Undine made no attempt to deny the charge or to defend herself.  For a moment she was lost in the pursuit of an unseizable clue—­the explanation of this monstrous last perversity of fate.  Suddenly she rose to her feet with a set face.

“The Marvells must have told him—­the beasts!” It relieved her to be able to cry it out.

“It was your husband’s sister—­what did you say her name was?  When you didn’t answer her cable, she cabled Mr. Van Degen to find out where you were and tell you to come straight back.”

Undine stared.  “He never did!”

“No.”

“Doesn’t that show you the story’s all trumped up?”

Indiana shook her head.  “He said nothing to you about it because he was with you when you received the first cable, and you told him it was from your sister-in-law, just worrying you as usual to go home; and when he asked if there was anything else in it you said there wasn’t another thing.”

Undine, intently following her, caught at this with a spring.  “Then he knew it all along—­he admits that?  And it made no earthly difference to him at the time?” She turned almost victoriously on her friend.  “Did he happen to explain that, I wonder?”

“Yes.”  Indiana’s longanimity grew almost solemn.  “It came over him gradually, he said.  One day when he wasn’t feeling very well he thought to himself:  ‘Would she act like that to me if I was dying?’ And after that he never felt the same to you.”  Indiana lowered her empurpled lids.  “Men have their feelings too—­even when they’re carried away by passion.”  After a pause she added:  “I don’t know as I can blame him.  Undine.  You see, you were his ideal.”