“Don’t you dare to cry!” he stormed, kissing my reddened eyelids.  “Aren’t you ever going to get used to mother’s childish outbursts?  You know she doesn’t mean what she says in those tantrums of hers.  She simply works herself up to a point where she’s absolutely irresponsible, and she has to explode or burst.  You wouldn’t like to see a perfectly good mother-in-law strewn in fragment all over the room, simply because she had restrained her temper, would you?” he added, with the quick transition from hot anger to whimsical good nature that I always find so bewildering in him.

I struggled for composure.  My mother-in-law’s words had been too scathing, her insult too direct for me to look upon it as lightly as Dicky could, but the knowledge that he had come directly after me, and that he had no part in the resentment his mother showed, made it easy for me to control myself.

“I ought to remember that your mother is an old woman, and an invalid, and not allow myself to get angry at some of the unjust things she says,” I returned, swallowing hard.  “So we’ll just forget all about it and pretend it never happened.”

“You darling!” Dicky exclaimed, drawing me closer, and for a moment or two I rested in his arms, gathering courage for the confession I meant to make to him.

“Dicky, dear,” I murmured at last, “there is something I want to tell you about this miserable business, something I ought to have told you before, but I kept putting it off.”

Dicky held me from him and looked at me quizzically, “’Confession is good for the soul,’” he quoted, “so unburden your dreadful secret.”

He drew me to an easy chair and sat down, holding me in his arms as if I were a little child.  “Now for it,” he said, smiling tenderly at me.

“It isn’t so very terrible,” I smiled at him reassured by his tenderness.  “It is only that without telling you a deliberate untruth, that I gave both you and your mother the impression I had never seen Mr. Gordon before that night at the Sydenham.”

“Is that all?” mocked Dicky.  “Why, I knew that the moment you spoke as you did that night!  You’re as transparent as a child, my dear, and besides, your elderly friend let the cat out of the bag when he said he feared he had annoyed you by trying to find out your identity.  I knew you must have seen him somewhere.”

“You don’t know all,” I persisted, and then without reservation I told him frankly the whole story of Mr. Gordon’s spying upon me.  I omitted nothing.

When I had finished, Dicky’s face had lost its quizzical look.  He was frowning, not angrily, but as if puzzled.

“Don’t think I blame you one bit,” he said slowly; “but it looks to me as if mother’s dope might be right, as if the old guy is smitten with you after all.”

“I cannot hope to make your understand, Dicky,” I began, “how confused my emotions are concerning Mr. Gordon.  I think perhaps I can tell you best by referring to something about which we have never talked but once—­the story I told you before we were married of the tragedy in my mother’s life.”