Her eyes filled with tears, round drops that gathered slowly in the corners of her puckered lids and spilled over the soft curves of her cheek.  She did not look at Hollister.  She stared at the gray river.  She made a little gesture, as if she dumbly answered some futile question, and her hands dropped idly into her lap.

“I feel guilty,” she continued after a little, “not because I failed to play up to the role of the faithful wife.  I couldn’t help that.  But I shouldn’t have kept that money, I suppose.  Still, you were dead.  Money meant nothing to you.  It was in my hands and I needed it, or thought I did.  You must have had a hard time, Robin, coming back to civil life a beggar.”

“Yes, but not for lack of money,” Hollister replied.  “I didn’t need much and I had enough.  It was being scarred so that everybody shunned me.  It was the horror of being alone, of finding men and women always uneasy in my presence, always glad to get away from me.  They acted as if I were a monstrosity that offended them beyond endurance.  I couldn’t blame them much.  Sometimes it gave me the shivers to look at myself in the glass.  I am a horrible sight.  People who must be around me seem to get used to me, whether they like it or not.  But at first I nearly went mad.  I had been uprooted and disfigured.  Nobody wanted to know me, to talk to me, to be friendly.  However, that’s past.  I have got a start.  Unless this skeleton is dragged out of the closet, I shall get on well enough.”

“I shall not drag it out, Robin,” she assured him with a faint smile.  “Some day I hope I’ll be able to give you back that money.”

“What became of it?” He voiced a question which had been recurring in his mind for a year.  “You must have had over forty thousand dollars when I was reported dead in ’17.”

Myra shrugged her shoulders.

“We were married six months after that.  Jim has some rather well-to-do people over there.  They were all very nice to me.  I imagine they thought he was marrying money.  Perhaps he thought so himself.  He had nothing except a quarterly pittance.  He has no sense of values, and I was not much better.  There is always this estate which he will come into, to discount the present.  He had seen service the first year of the war.  He was wounded and invalided home.  Then he served as a military instructor.  Finally, when the Americans came in, he was allowed to resign.  So we came across to the States.  We went here and there, spending as we went.  We cut a pretty wide swath too, most of the time.  There were several disastrous speculations.  Presently the money was all gone.  Then we came up here, where we can live on next to nothing.  We shall have to stay here another eighteen months.  Looking back, the way we spent money seems sheer lunacy.  The fool and his money—­you know.  And it wasn’t our money.  That hurts me now.  I’ve begun to realize what money means to me, to you, to every one.  That’s