She freed herself with what dignity she could command.  He asked her a hundred times if she loved him, if she could forgive him.  Her one impulse was to silence him, to have him go away.

“I know—­I know how you feel, Wallie!  I’m sorry—­for you and myself, and the whole thing!  I’m terribly sorry!  I—­I don’t know what we can do.  I have to go away, of course; I can’t stay here until we know; and you’ll have to investigate, and find out just what she claims.  I’ll go to Sally, I suppose.  People can think I’ve come up to help when the baby comes—­I don’t care what they think!”

“I thought you might go to Oakland for awhile,” he agreed, gratefully; “but of course it’ll be best to have you go to Sally—­ it’ll only be for a few days.  Mart, I feel rotten about it!”

“I know you do, Wallace,” she answered nervously.

“To spring this on you—­it’s just rotten!”

Martie was silent.  Her mind was in a whirl.

“Will you go out?” she asked simply.  “I want to dress.”

“What do you want me to go out for?” he asked, amazed.

Again his wife was silent.  Her cheeks were bright scarlet, her eyes hard and dry.  She looked at him steadily, and he got clumsily to his feet.

“Sure I’ll go out!” he said stupidly.  “I’ll do anything you want me to.  I feel like a skunk about this—­it had sort of slipped my mind, Mart!  Every fellow lets himself in for something like this.”

Trapped.  It was the one thought she had when he was gone, and when she had sprung feverishly from bed, and was quickly dressing.  Trapped, in this friendly, comfortable room, where she had been so happy and so proud!  She had been so innocently complacent over her state as this man’s wife, she had planned for their future so courageously.  Now she was—­what?  Now she was—­what?

Just to escape somehow and instantly, that was the first wild impulse.  He was gone, but he was coming back:  he must not find her here.  She must disappear, nobody must ever find her.  Sally and her father, Rose and Rodney must never know!  Martie Monroe, married to a man who was married before, disgraced, exiled, lost.  Nobody knew that she was going to have a baby, but Monroe would surmise that.

Oh, fool—­fool—­fool that she had been to marry him so!  But it was too late for that.  She must face the situation now, and fret over the past some other day.

She had felt the thought of a return to Monroe intolerable:  but quickly she changed her mind.  Sally’s home might be an immediate retreat, she could rest there, and plan there.  Her sister was eagerly awaiting an answer to the letter in which she begged Martie to come to her for the month of the baby’s birth.

Martie, packing frantically, glanced at the clock.  It was two o’clock now, she could get the four o’clock boat.  She would be in peaceful Monroe at seven.  And after that—–?

After that she did not know.  Should she ever return to Wallace, under any circumstances?  Should she tell Sally?  Should she hide both Wallace’s revelations and the morning’s earlier hopes of motherhood?