FALLON:  I haven’t changed toward you.  How’s that husband of yours?  (Jokingly.) I’d ought to shot that fellow.

MRS. HOWARD:  (In distress.) That’s why I came, Dick.  Oh, Dick—­

FALLON:  (Anxiously, incredulously.) Don’t tell me there’s any trouble between you and Tom?  Why, old Tom he just worships you.  He loves you like—­

MRS. HOWARD:  That’s it.  And I want to keep his love.

FALLON:  (Laughingly.) Keep his love?  Is that all you’ve got to worry about? (Throughout the following scene, Mrs. Howard speaks in a fateful voice, like a woman beaten and hopeless.)

MRS. HOWARD:  Dick, did you ever guess why I didn’t marry you?

FALLON:  No, I knew.  You didn’t marry me because you didn’t love me, and you did love Tom.

MRS. HOWARD:  No, I didn’t know Tom then.  And I thought I loved you, until I met Tom.  But I didn’t marry you, because it wouldn’t have been honest—­because, three years before I met you, I had lived with a man—­as his wife.

FALLON:  Helen! (His tone is one of amazement, but not of reproach.  In his astonishment, he picks the cigar from the table, puffs at it standing and partly seated on the table.)

MRS. HOWARD:  (In the same dead level, hopeless voice.) I was seventeen years old.  I was a waiter girl at one of Fred Harvey’s restaurants on the Santa Fe.  I was married to this man before a magistrate. (Fallon lifts his head.) Three months later, when he’d grown tired of me, he told me the magistrate who had married us was not a magistrate but a friend of his, a man named Louis Mohun, and he brought this man to live with us.  I should have left him then, that was where I did wrong.  That was all I did that was wrong.  But, I couldn’t leave him, I couldn’t, because I was going to be a mother—­and in spite of what he had done—­I begged him to marry me.

FALLON:  And—­he wouldn’t?

MRS. HOWARD:  Maybe he would—­but—­he was killed.

FALLON:  (Eagerly.) You?

MRS. HOWARD. (In horror.) God, no!

FALLON:  It’s a pity.  That’s what you should have done.

MRS. HOWARD:  He was a gambler, one night he cheated—­the man he cheated, shot him.  Then—­my baby—­died!  After two years I came to San Francisco and met you and Tom.  Then you went to Klondike and I married Tom.

FALLON:  And, you told Tom?

MRS. HOWARD:  (Lowering her face.)

FALLON:  Helen!

MRS. HOWARP:  I know, but I was afraid.  I loved him so, and I was afraid.

FALLON:  But Tom would have understood.  Why, you thought you were married.

MRS. HOWARD:  I was afraid.  I loved him too much.  I was too happy, and I was afraid I’d lose him. (FALLON shakes his head.) But, we were leaving San Francisco forever—­to live in the East—­where I thought no one knew me.

FALLON:  Well?