They had sauntered out of the library, well before closing time, Billy delighted to have found his reference, Susan glad to get out into the cool summer night.

“Oysters?” asked William.  Susan hesitated.

“This doesn’t come out of my expenses,” she stipulated.  “I’m hard-up this week!”

“Oh, no—­no!  This is up to me,” Billy said.  So they went in to watch the oyster-man fry them two hot little panfuls, and sat over the coarse little table-cloth for a long half-hour, contentedly eating and talking.  Fortified, they walked home, Susan so eager to interrogate Big Mary about the children that she reached the orderly kitchen quite breathless.

Not a sound out of any of them was Big Mary’s satisfactory report.  Still their mother ran upstairs.  Children had been known to die while parents and guardians supposed them to be asleep.

However the young Olivers were slumbering safely, and were wide-awake in a flash, the boys clamoring for drinks, from the next room, Josephine wide-eyed and dewy, through the bars of her crib.  Susan sat down with the baby, while Billy opened windows, wound the alarm clock, and quieted his sons.

A full half-hour passed before everything was quiet.  Susan found herself lying wakeful in the dark.  Presently she said: 

“Billy?”

“What is it?” he asked, roused instantly.

“Why, I saw something funny in the London ‘News’ to-night,” Susan began.  She repeated the paragraph.  Billy speculated upon it interestedly.

“Sure, he’s probably gone back to his wife,” said Billy.  “Circumstances influence us all, you know.”

“Do you mean that you don’t think he ever meant to get a divorce?”

“Oh, no, not necessarily!  Especially if there was any reason for him to get it.  I think that, if it had been possible, he would have gotten it.  If not, he wouldn’t have.  Selfish, you know, darned selfish!”

Susan pondered in silence.

“I was to blame,” she said finally.

“Oh, no, you weren’t, not as much as he was—­and he knew it!” Billy said.

“All sensation has so entirely died out of the whole thing,” Susan said presently, “that it’s just like looking at a place where you burned your hand ten years ago, and trying to remember whether the burn hurt worst, or dressing the burn, or curing the burn!  I know it was all wrong, but at the time I thought it was only convention I was going against—­I didn’t realize that one of the advantages of laws is that you can follow them blind, when you’ve lost all your moorings.  You can’t follow your instincts, but you can remember your rule.  I’ve thought a lot about Stephen Bocqueraz in the past few years, and I don’t believe he meant to do anything terribly wrong and, as things turned out, I think he really did me more good than harm!  I’m confident that but for him I would have married Kenneth, and he certainly did teach me a lot about poetry, Billy, about art and music, and more than that, about the spirit of art and music and poetry, the sheer beauty of the world.  So I’ve let all the rest go, like the fever out of a burn, and I believe I could meet him now, and like him almost.  Does that seem very strange to you?  Have you any feeling of resentment?”