“No one,” he said in a voice unnaturally level and dry.  “I went to see the show on the recommendation of a country client, and there she was on the stage.”

“Oh!” cried Frederica—­a muffled, barely audible cry of passionate sympathy.  Then: 

“Roddy,” she demanded, “are you sure it’s true?  Are you absolutely sure that it’s really Rose?  Or if it is, that she’s in her right mind—­that she hasn’t just wandered off as people do sometimes without knowing who they are?”

“There’s nothing in that notion,” he said.  “It’s Rose all right, and she knows what she’s doing.”

“You mean you’ve seen her off the stage—­talked with her?”

He nodded.

She pulled in a long sigh of anticipatory relief.

“Well, then,” she demanded, “what did she say?  How did she explain how she could have done such a thing as that?”

“I didn’t ask her to explain,” said Rodney.  “I asked her to come home, and she wouldn’t.”

“Oh, it’s wicked!” she cried.  “It’s the most abominably selfish thing I ever heard of!”

He made a gesture of protest, but it didn’t stop her.

“Oh, I suppose,” she flashed, “she didn’t mean any harm—­wasn’t just trying to do the cruelest thing she could to you.  But it would be a little less infuriating if she had.”

“Pull up, Freddy!” he said.  Rather gently though, for him.  “There’s no good going on like that.  And besides ...  You were saying Harriet would do anything in the world for me.  Well, there’s something you can do.  You’re the only person I know who can.”

Her answer was to come around behind his chair, put her cheek down beside his, and reach for his hands.

“Let’s get away from this miserable breakfast table,” she said.  “Come up to where I live, where we can be safely by ourselves; then tell me about it.”

In front of her boudoir fire, looking down on her as she sat in her flowered wing chair, an enormously distended rug-covered pillow beside her knees waiting for him to drop down on when he felt like it, he began rather cautiously to tell her what he wanted.

“I’ll tell you the reason why I’ve come to you,” he began, “and then you’ll see.  Do you remember nearly two years ago, the night I got wet coming down here to dinner—­the night you were going to marry me off to Hermione Woodruff?  We had a long talk afterward, and you said, speaking of the chances people took getting married, that it wasn’t me you worried about, but the girl, whoever she might be, who married me.”

The little gesture she made admitted the recollection, but denied its relevancy.  She’d have said something to that effect, but he prevented her.

“No,” he insisted, “it wasn’t just talk.  There was something to it.  Afterward, when we were engaged, two or three times, you gave me tips about things.  And since we’ve been married ...  Well, somehow, I’ve had the feeling that you were on her side; that you saw things her way—­things that I didn’t see.”