“I wonder why I should go all to pieces like that so suddenly?” she muttered.  “And why I should somehow feel better for it?”

“I don’t know,” MacRae said.  “Maybe I could tell you if I knew why you went off like that.  You poor little devil.  Something has stung you deep, I know.”

“Yes,” she admitted.  “I hope nothing like it ever comes to you, Jack.  I’m bleeding internally.  Oh, it hurts, it hurts!”

She laid her head against him and cried again softly.

“Tell me,” he whispered.

“Why not?” She lifted her head after a little.  “You could always keep things to yourself.  It wasn’t much wonder they called you Silent John.  Do you know I never really grasped The Ancient Mariner until now?  People must tell their troubles to some one—­or they’d corrode inside.”

“Go ahead,” MacRae encouraged.

“When Norman Gower went overseas we were engaged,” she said bluntly, and stopped.  She was not looking at MacRae now.  She stared at the opposite wall, her fingers locked together in her lap.

“For four years,” she went on, “I’ve been hoping, dreaming, waiting, loving.  To-day he came home to tell me that he married in England two years ago.  Married in the madness of a drunken hour—­that is how he puts it—­a girl who didn’t care for anything but the good time his rank and pay could give her.”

“I think you’re in luck,” MacRae said soberly.

“What queer creatures men are!” She seemed not to have heard him—­to be thinking her own thoughts out loud.  “He says he loves me, that he has loved me all the time, that he feels as if he had been walking in his sleep and fallen into some muddy hole.  And I believe him.  It’s terrible, Johnny.”

“It’s impossible,” MacRae declared savagely.  “If he’s got in that kind of a hole, let him stay there.  You’re well out of it.  You ought to be glad.”

“But I’m not,” she said sadly.  “I’m not made that way.  I can’t let a thing become a vital part of my life and give it up without a pang.”

“I don’t see what else you can do,” MacRae observed.  “Only brace up and forget it.”

“It isn’t quite so simple as that,” she sighed.  “Norman’s w—­this woman presently got tired of him.  Evidently she had no scruples about getting what she wanted, nor how.  She went away with another man.  Norman is getting a divorce—­the decree absolute will be granted in March next.  He wants me to marry him.”

“Will you?”

Dolly looked up to meet MacRae’s wondering stare.  She nodded.

“You’re a triple-plated fool,” he said roughly.

“I don’t know,” she replied thoughtfully.  “Norman certainly has been.  Perhaps I am too.  We should get on—­a pair of fools together.”

The bitterness in her voice stung MacRae.

“You really should have loved me,” he said, “and I you.”

“But you don’t, Jack.  You have never thought of that before.”