Minna, admiring her mother’s clothes, walked with her to the door and waved her down the bleak staircase.

It was precisely one o’clock when Marie Kerr entered the lounge of the big restaurant, where she had waited some while for Osborn on a birthday evening which she remembered keenly this morning.  But this time he was there before her, waiting anxious and alert, like a lover for the lady of his affections.  He had booked a table and upon it, as she sat down, she saw, laid beside her cover, a big bunch of her favourite violets, blue and dewy.

“You still like them best?” he asked.

“Still faithful,” she smiled back lightly and, when she had thrown open her coat, she pinned them at her breast.

She looked around her unafraid.

Her clothes were good; her hair was burnished; her hands were white; her man worshipped like the other women’s men.

She was once more, after that long, that humble and tearful abdication, at the zenith of her power.

* * * * *

They did not rise from their table until nearly three o’clock.  Twice she had asked:  “How about the firm?” and twice he had answered irreverently:  “Let them be hanged!” He looked into her eyes wondering and hoping, but in their clearness read no promise.  He tried to lead their talk round to the one subject which pervaded and appalled him, but each time that he drove in his wedge of reference she shook her head at him, smiled and closed her lips, as a woman saying:  “You don’t talk me over in this world or the next.”

But when he reminded her “It was here, to this very table, that I took you, on your birthday before last,” she joined him in reminiscence.

“And I was miserable, envying every woman I saw, ashamed of my frock and my hands and my old shoes; ashamed of everything.  I knew I couldn’t compete.”

“You could compete with any woman in the world.”  He cast a deprecating look around them.

“I couldn’t then.  There was a woman I specially envied, I remember, an actress whose name you knew.  How long ago it seems.”

“Only a year and a half,” he replied quickly, plunging into a side issue.

“You admired her,” she said curiously, “didn’t you?”

He lied:  “I don’t remember.”

“I do,” she said.  “I used to pray about you—­that woman was in my mind when I prayed, and asked God to make you admire me for the children I’d borne, and not to let you see how old and ugly I should grow.  Doesn’t it seem funny?”

“It’s not at all funny,” he said, his eyes on the tablecloth.  “I’m sorry you—­if you’d told me—­talked to me—­”

“You’d have thought me more of a whining wife than ever.”

“Well, it’s over, anyway.  Won’t you forget it?”

“I’m just delighted to forget it.  But there’s a kind of joy in remembering all the same, such as a man feels in thinking of his starvation early days after he’s made himself rich.”