“Only one?”

“And that for you,” he said.  “At least, you’ve got a small income.”

“But I haven’t,” she replied.  “Dory made me turn it over to mother.”

Arthur stared.  “Dory!”

“Yes,” she answered, with a nod and a smile.  It would have given Dory a surprise, a vastly different notion as to what she thought of him, had he seen her unawares just then.

“Made you?”

“Made,” she repeated.

“And you did it?”

“I’ve promised I will.”

“Why?”

“I don’t just know,” was her slow reply.

“Because he was afraid it might make bad blood between you and me?”

“That was one of the reasons he urged,” she admitted.  “But he thought, too, it would be bad for him and me.”

A long silence.  Then Arthur:  “Del, I almost think you’re not making such a mistake as I feared, in marrying him.”

“So do I—­sometimes,” was his sister’s, to him, astonishing answer, in an absent, speculative tone.

Arthur withheld the question that was on his lips.  He looked curiously at the small graceful head, barely visible in the deepening twilight.  “She’s a strange one,” he reflected.  “I don’t understand her—­and I doubt if she understands herself.”

And that last was very near to the truth.  Everyone has a reason for everything he does; but it by no means follows that he always knows that reason, or even could extricate it from the tangle of motives, real and reputed, behind any given act.  This self-ignorance is less common among men than among women, with their deliberate training to self-consciousness and to duplicity; it is most common among those—­men as well as women—­who think about themselves chiefly.  And Adelaide, having little to think about when all her thinking was hired out, had of necessity thought chiefly about herself.

“You guessed that Janet has thrown me over?” Arthur said, to open the way for relieving his mind.

Adelaide made a gallant effort, and her desire to console him conquered her vanity.  “Just as Ross threw me over,” she replied, with a successful imitation of indifference.

Instead of being astonished at the news, Arthur was astonished at his not having guessed it.  His first sensation was the very human one of pleasure—­the feeling that he had companionship in humiliation.  He moved closer to her.  Then came an instinct, perhaps true, perhaps false, that she was suffering, that Ross had wounded her cruelly, that she was not so calm as her slim, erect figure seemed in the deep dusk.  He burst out in quiet, intense fury:  “Del, I’ll make those two wish to God they hadn’t!”

“You can’t do it, Artie,” she replied.  “The only power on earth that can do them up is themselves.”  She paused to vent the laugh that was as natural in the circumstances as it was unpleasant to hear.  “And I think they’ll do it,” she went on, “without any effort on your part—­or mine.”