“Where did you sit?” Jimmy asked.

“Fifth row,” said John.

Violet hadn’t got the bearing of Jimmy’s question.  “Oh, you couldn’t mistake her,” she said, “any more than you could in this room, now.”

“Do you mean,” John asked, “that she might have recognized us?”

“They can’t,” said Violet, “across the footlights,—­can they?”

Jimmy nodded.  “In a little theater like that,” he said, “anywhere in the house.  But it seems she didn’t recognize you.”

“Look here!” said Violet.  “Don’t you know, in your own mind, just as well as that you’re standing there, that that was Rose Aldrich?”

Jimmy dropped down into a big chair.  “Well,” he said, “I’m willing to accept it as a working hypothesis.”

“You men!” said Violet.

Dinner was announced just then, and the theme had to be dismissed until at last they were left alone with the dessert.

“What breaks me all up,” Violet burst out, abandoning the pretense of picking over her walnuts, and showing, with a little outflung gesture, how impatient she had been to take it up, “what breaks me all up is how this’ll hit Frederica.  She just adores Rodney and she’s been simply wonderful to Rose—­for him, of course.”

Neither of the men said anything, but she felt a little stir of protest from both of them and qualified the last phrase.

“Oh, she liked her for herself, too.  We all did.  We couldn’t help it.  But you haven’t any idea, either of you, of even the beginning of what Frederica did for her—­steered her just right, and pushed her just enough, and all the while seeming not to be doing a thing.  Freddy’s such a peach at that!  And she’s been so big-hearted about it; never even felt jealous.  If it had been me, and I’d adored a brother like that, and he’d gone off and fallen in love with a girl nobody knew, just because he saw her in a wrestling-match with a street-car conductor, I’d have wanted, whatever I might have done, to—­well, show her up.  And yet, even after Rose had left him, for no reason at all, Freddy ...”

“You’re just guessing at all that, you know,” her husband interrupted quietly.  “You don’t know a single thing about it.”

“Well, what reason could Rose have for leaving him?” she flashed back.  “Hasn’t Rodney been perfectly crazy about her ever since he married her?  Has he ever seen another woman the last two years?  Or maybe you think he’s been coming home drunk and beating her with a trunk-strap.”

But John stuck to his guns.  “You don’t even know she’s left him.  The only thing you do know is that Bella Forrester met Frederica one day, about a week before Christmas, in the railway station at Los Angeles.”

“Well, can you tell me any other reason,” Violet demanded, “why Freddy should dash off alone to California, right in the middle of the holiday rush, without saying a word to anybody, and be back here in just a week; and not tell even me what she’d been doing, or where she’d been, so that if Bella hadn’t written to me, I’d never have known about it at all?  Is there any way of explaining that, except by supposing that Rose had quarreled with Rodney and left him and that Freddy was trying to get her to come back?”