“I am perfectly wide awake,” I said coldly.  “I shall go to bed when I am entirely ready, and not before.  And as for Jim’s conduct, I do not know much about the conventions in such cases, but if he wishes to embrace Miss Knowles, and she wants him to, the situation is interesting, but hardly novel.”

Aunt Selina rose slowly and drew the folds of her dressing gown around her, away from the contamination of my touch.

“Do you know what you are saying?” she demanded hoarsely.

“I do.”  I was quite white and stiff from my knees up, but below I was wavery.  I glanced at Jim for moral support, but he was looking idolatrously at Bella.  As for her, quite suddenly she had dropped her mask of indifference; her face was strained and anxious, and there were deep circles I had not seen before, under her eyes.  And it was Bella who finally threw herself into the breach—­the family breach.

“It is all my fault, Miss Caruthers,” she said, stepping between Aunt Selina and myself.  “I have been a blind and wicked woman, and I have almost wrecked two lives.”

Two!  What of mine?

“You see,” she struggled on, against the glint in Aunt Selina’s eyes.  “I—­I did not realize how much I cared, until it was too late.  I did so many things that were cruel and wrong—­oh, Jim, Jim!”

She turned and buried her head on his shoulder and cried; real tears.  I could hardly believe that it was Bella.  And Jim put both his arms around her and almost cried, too, and looked nauseatingly happy with the eye he turned to Bella, and scared to death out of the one he kept on Aunt Selina.

She turned on me, as of course I knew she would.

“That,” she said, pointing at Jim and Bella, “that shameful picture is due to your own indifference.  I am not blind; I have seen how you rejected all his loving advances.”  Bella drew away from Jim, but he jerked her back.  “If anything in the world would reconcile me to divorce, it is this unbelievable situation.  James, are you shameless?”

But James was and didn’t care who knew it.  And as there was nothing else to do, and no one else to do it, I stood very straight against the door frame, and told the whole miserable story from the very beginning.  I told how Dal and Jim had persuaded me, and how I had weakened and found it was too late, and how Bella had come in that night, when she had no business to come, and had sat down in the basement kitchen on my hands and almost turned me into a raving maniac.  As I went on I became fluent; my sense of injury grew on me.  I made it perfectly clear that I hated them all, and that when people got divorces they ought to know their own minds and stay divorced.  And at that a great light broke on Aunt Selina, who hadn’t understood until that minute.

In view of her principles, she might have been expected to turn on Jim and Bella, and disinherit them, and cast them out, figuratively, with the flaming sword of her tongue.  But she did not!