“Certainly he’s divorced,” he said briefly.

Martie’s heart thumped.  The flowers in her hands, she stood staring away from him, unseeing.

“I hope you’ll forgive me—­I feel like a fool touching the thing at all,” Dean Silver said, after a silence.  “But I thought that there was some sort of an understanding between you.”

“Oh, no!” Martie half-whispered, with a fluttered breath.

“There isn’t?” he asked, in a tone of keen protest.

“Oh, no!”

The novelist whistled a few notes and shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, then, there isn’t,” he said philosophically.  He stooped to pick a fragrant spike of mignonette, and put it in his buttonhole.  When he began speaking again, he did not look at Martie.  “A few of us have come to know Dryden well, this winter,” he said gravely.  “He’s a rare fellow, Mrs. Bannister—­a big man, and he’s got his field to himself.  You wouldn’t believe me if I told you what a fuss they’ve been making over him—­back there, and how little it matters to him.  He’s going a long way.  You—­you’ve got to be kind to him, my dear girl.”

“I’m a Catholic, and he’s a divorced man,” Martie said, turning troubled eyes toward him.  “I never thought of him in that way!”

Dean Silver raised his eyebrows.

“People are still believing that sort of thing, are they?”

“Only about a hundred million!” she answered, drily in her turn.

The man laughed shortly.

“Sweet complication!” he observed.

“More than that,” Martie said hurriedly, “I’m engaged to be married to the president of the bank here, in about six weeks!”

Their eyes met steadily for a full minute.

“I devoutly trust you are not serious?” said Dean Silver then.

“Oh, but I am!” she said, with a nervous laugh.

For answer he merely shrugged his shoulders again.  In silence they turned toward the house.

“That is an actual settled fact, is it?” Silver asked, when they were at the steps.

“Why, yes!” Martie answered, feeling a strange inclination toward tears.  “I’ve been here for a year and a half,” she added lamely.  “I’ve not seen John—­I tell you I never thought of him as anything but Adele’s husband!  And Clifford—­the man I am to marry—­is a good man, and it means a home for life for my boy and me—­and it means the greatest pleasure to my father and sisters—­”

“I think I never heard such a damnable set of reasons for a beautiful woman’s marriage!” Silver said, as she paused.

Martie could find no answer.  She was excited, bewildered, thrilled, all at once.  She felt that another word would be too much.  Silently she picked up her bowl and her flowers, and crossed the porch to the house.

Lydia, coming in late from a meeting of the Fair Committee, was speechless.  In a pregnant silence she lent cold aid to her audacious sister.  The big bed in Len’s room was made, the bureau spread with a clean, limp towel.  Pauline was interviewed; she brightened.  Dean Silver was from Prince Edward’s Island, too, it seemed.  Pauline could make onion soup, and rolls were set, thanks be!  She could open preserves; she didn’t suppose that sliced figs were good enough for a company dessert.