“Well, Honora, I found the note and I know the whole of your trouble.  Remember,” she said quietly, “it’s your great hour.  You have a chance to show what you’re made of now.”

“What I’m made of!” said Honora brokenly.  “I’m like all the women.  I’m dying of jealousy, Kate,—­dying of it.”

“Jealousy—­you?” cried Kate.  “Why, Honora—­”

“You thought I couldn’t feel it, I suppose,—­thought I was above it?  I’m not above anything—­not anything—­” Her voice straggled off into a curious, shameless sob with a sound in it like the bleating of a lamb.

“Stop that!” said Kate, sharply.  “Pull yourself together, woman.  Don’t be a fool.”

“Go away,” sobbed Honora.  “Don’t stay here to watch me.  My heart is broken, that’s all.  Can’t you let me alone?”

“No, I can’t—­I won’t.  Stand up and fight, woman.  You can be magnificent, if you want to.  It can’t be that you’d grovel, Honora.”

“You know very little of what you’re talking about,” cried Honora, whipped into wholesome anger at last.  “I’ve been a fool from the beginning.  The whole thing’s my fault.”

“I don’t see how.”

Kate was getting her to talk; was pulling her up out of the pit of shame and anguish into which she had fallen.  She sat down in a deal chair which stood by the window, and Honora, without realizing it, dropped into a chair, too.  The neutral morning sky was beginning to flush and the rosiness reached across the lead-gray lake, illuminated the windows of the sleeping houses, and tinted even the haggard monochrome of the laboratory with a promise of day.

“Why, it’s my fault because I wouldn’t take what was coming to me.  I wouldn’t even be what I was born to be!”

“I know,” said Kate, “that you underwent some sort of a transformation.  What was it?”

She hardly expected an answer, but Honora developed a perfervid lucidity.

“Oh, Kate, you’ve said yourself that I was a very different girl when you knew me first.  I was a student then, and an ambitious one, too; but there wasn’t a girl in this city more ready for a woman’s role than I. I longed to be loved—­I lived in the idea of it.  No matter how hard I tried to devote myself to the notion of a career, I really was dreaming of the happiness that was going to come to me when—­when Life had done its duty by me.”

She spoke the words with a dramatic clearness.  The terrific excitement she had undergone, and which she now held in hand, sharpened her faculties.  The powers of memory and of expression were intensified.  She fairly burned upon Kate there in the beautiful, disguising light of the morning.  Her weary face was flushed; her eyes were luminous.  Her terrific sorrow put on the mask of joy.

“You see, I loved David almost from the first—­I mean from the beginning of my University work.  The first time I saw him crossing the campus he held my attention.  There was no one else in the least like him, so vivid, so exotic, so almost fierce.  When I found out who he was, I confess that I directed my studies so that I should work with him.  Not that I really expected to know him personally, but I wanted to be near him and have him enlarge life for me.  I felt that it would take on new meanings if I could only hear his interpretations of it.”