“Somehow’s just the word; they never get beyond that.  Of course I knew Frank would be sure to marry some day.  And with his good looks it’s a wonder he didn’t do so long ago.  Most girls is so crazy about a good-lookin’ fellow that they never stop to think if he has anything else to him.  Not that he hasn’t lots of good traits, I don’t mean that.  But,” she added shrewdly, “you don’t look like the silly sort that would be taken in by good looks alone.”

“No,” said Nora dryly, “I don’t think I am.”

After that, until the two men returned, they talked of household matters, and Nora found that her new neighbor had a store of useful and practical suggestions to make, and, what was even better, seemed glad to place all her experience at her disposal in the kindliest and most friendly manner possible, entirely free from any trace of that patronage which had so maddened her in her sister-in-law.

“Now mind you,” called Mrs. Sharp, as she laboriously climbed up to the seat beside her husband as they were driving away, “if Frank, here, gets at all upish—­and he’s pretty certain to, all newly married men do—­you come to me.  I’ll settle him, never fear.”

Frank laughed a little over-loudly at this parting shot, and Nora noticed that for some time after their guests had gone, he seemed unusually silent.

As for the Sharps, they also maintained an unwonted silence—­which for Mrs. Sharp, at least, was something unusual—­until they had arrived at their own door.

“Well?” queried Sharp, as they were about to turn in.

“It beats me,” replied his wife.  “Why, she’s a lady.  But she’ll come out all right,” she finished enigmatically, “she’s got the right stuff in her, poor dear!”

In after years, when Nora was able to look back on this portion of her life and see things in just perspective, she always felt that she could never be too thankful that her days had been crowded with occupation.  Without that, she must either have gone actually insane, or, in a frenzy of helplessness, done some rash thing which would have marred her whole life beyond repair.

After she found herself growing more accustomed to her new life—­and, after all, the growing accustomed to it was the hardest part—­she realized that she was only following the universal law of life in paying for her own rash act.  The thought that she was paying with interest, being overcharged as it were, was but faint consolation:  it only meant that she had been a fool.  That conviction is rarely soothing.

Then, too, she gradually began to look at the situation from Frank’s point of view.  He had certainly acted within his rights, if with little generosity.  But she had to acknowledge to herself that the obligation to be generous on his part was small.  She could hardly be said to have treated him with much liberality in the past.

She had used him without scruple as a means to an end.  She had made him the instrument for escaping from a predicament which she found unbearably irksome.  That she had done so in the heat of passion was small palliation.  For the present, at least, she wisely resolved to make the best of things.  It could not last forever.  The day must come when she could free herself from the bonds that now held her.