“This will never do,” thought Thornton, and for the first time he sensed the power the older sister had over the younger.  It was already making its way into his kingdom, and Thornton never shared what was his own!

Doris remained abroad for a time, readjusting her life as one does who is maimed.  Her devotion to Meredith, she saw now, had been her one passion—­to what could she turn?

The letters that presently came from Meredith, while they set much of her fear at rest, made her feel more lonely, nor did they seem to set her free to make permanent plans.  She sank into a waiting mood—­waiting for letters!

“I’ll play around Europe for awhile,” she whimsically decided.  “I’ll buy things for that chapel Sister Angela is planning, and polish my manners.  And,” here Doris grew grave, “I’ll think of David Martin!  I wish I could love Davey enough to marry him as I feel he wants me to—­and let him blot out this ache for Merry.”  But that was not to be.

And Meredith wrote her letters to her sister and smiled upon her husband—­for after the third month of her marriage that was the best she could do for either of them.  All the ideals of her self-blinded life were being swept away in the glaring flame of reality.

Thornton was still infatuated and went to great lengths to prove to his pale, starry-eyed wife her power over him.  He was delighted at the impression she made upon the rather hectic but exclusive circle in which he moved; but he dreaded, vaguely to be sure, her hearing, in a gross way, references to his life before she entered it.  So quite frankly and a bit sketchily he confided it to her himself.

“Of course that is ended forever,” he said; “you have led me from darkness to light, you wonderful child!  Why, Merry, you simply have made a new and better man of me—­I understand the real value of things now.”

But did he?

Merry was looking at him as if she were doubting her senses.  Things she had heard in her girlhood, things that floated about in the dark corners of her memory, were pressing close.  Dreadful things that had been forced upon her against her will but which she reasoned could never happen to her, or to any of her own.

“You mean,” she faltered gropingly at last, “that another woman has——­” She could not voice the ugly words and Thornton was obliged to be a little more explicit.

Then he saw his wife retreat—­spiritually.  He hastened after her as best he could.

“You see, darling,” he was frightened, “out here, where a fellow is cut off from home ties and all that, the old code does not hold—­how could it?  I’m no exception.  Why, good Lord! child——­” but Meredith was not listening.  He saw that and it angered him.

She was hearing words spoken long ago—­oh! years and years ago it seemed.  Words that had lured her from Doris, from safety, from all the dangerous peace that had been hers.