Julia uttered the words “my husband” with a pleasure which she could not secrete from the eyes of Marie.  Had she not known it, too?  Had she not once delighted in saying, “My husband thinks.” ...  “My husband says.” ...  “My husband does....” simply for the crass joy of hearing the sound?

Julia went on: 

“When can it be?  Let’s fix a date early.  Do, there’s a dear!  There’ll be a peculiar joy to Desmond and me in having in our own house Osborn and you, the very two people who always told us the truth about marriage, and urged us to go and do likewise!”

“The truth?” Marie echoed.

“How wonderful it was!” Julia said sublimely.

As Julia sat there, glowing and content, Marie recognised that she had forgotten all the sad things she had been told and that only the glory remained.  Julia had harked back to that first year in which the young Kerrs had chanted together: 

“Marriage is the only life.”

And separately: 

“A woman can be an angel.”

“A man a brute?  A man’s a god.”

Julia continued:  “To-day’s Monday.  We’re still furnishing, of course, as I told you, but that won’t matter, will it?  Can you both come to dinner on Thursday and see the two happiest people in the world?”

“Edifying as the sight must be—­” Marie began with smiling lips.  But then she put the baby down and, covering her face with her hands, cried bitterly:  “Would the two happiest people in the world like to see the two miserablest people in it?”

While her face was still covered, she felt Julia’s arms about her, heard her disconcerted voice begging to be told.  But when at last Marie looked up, with tears salt and bitter on her cheeks, it was to reply sombrely: 

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“What has happened?” Julia begged.

Marie said slowly, twisting her hands:  “I felt, when I came home, after a joy-year which he didn’t want to give me the remotest chance of sharing, that—­that I could never forgive him for all those years of losing my health and looks, those years of work and worry and child-bearing; those years of quarrelling and grudging; those dead, drab, ugly, ordinary married years.  And so....”

“And so, my dear?”

“And so I have not forgiven him.  He killed the love in me.  There is no more for him.”

“If there is no more,” said Julia, with a sudden instinct, “why do you cry, my dear?  And why does this hurt you so?”

“To—­to see you so happy,” Marie whispered up to her, “to see you and Desmond as Osborn and I once were.”

“And as you want to be again, my dear, if you only knew it.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“Marie, what do you mean?”

“I told him to make his own life.  I’m not a dog-in-the-manger woman, anyway.  What I don’t want I’ll give away freely.”

“What can you mean?”

“I’ve given him away.”  The knowledge that had come upon her in the car that Saturday afternoon made her voice grim.  “He’s gone elsewhere,” she said; “I feel it; I know it.  A wife can sense these things as a barometer senses rain.”