“I had a talk with the Fraides to-day,” she said “A long talk.  Mr. Fraide said great things of you—­things I wouldn’t have believed from anybody but Mr. Fraide.”  She altered her position and looked from Loder’s face back into the fire.

He took a step forward.  “What things?” he said.  He was almost ashamed of the sudden, inordinate satisfaction that welled up at her words.

“Oh, I mustn’t tell you!” She laughed a little.  “But you have surprised him.”  She paused, sipped her tea, then looked up again with a change of expression.

“John,” she said, more seriously, “there is one point that sticks a little.  Will this great change last?” Her voice was direct and even—­wonderfully direct for a woman, Loder thought.  It came to him with a certain force that beneath her remarkable charm might possibly lie a remarkable character.  It was not a possibility that had occurred to him before, and it caused him to look at her a second time.  In the new light he saw her beauty differently, and it interested him differently.  Heretofore he had been inclined to class women under three heads—­idols, amusements, or encumbrances; now it crossed his mind that a woman might possibly fill another place—­the place of a companion.

“You are very sceptical,” he said, still looking down at her.

She did not return his glance.  “I think I have been made sceptical,” she said.

As she spoke the image of Chilcote shot through his mind.  Chilcote, irritable, vicious, unstable, and a quick compassion for this woman so inevitably shackled to him followed it.

Eve, unconscious of what was passing in his mind, went on with her subject.

“When we were married,” she said, gently, “I had such a great interest in things, such a great belief in life.  I had lived in politics, and I was marrying one of the coming men—­everybody said you were one of the coming men—­I scarcely felt there was anything left to ask for.  You didn’t make very ardent love,” she smiled, “but I think I had forgotten about love.  I wanted nothing so much as to be like Lady Sarah—­married to a great man.”  She paused, then went on more hurriedly:  “For a while things went right; then slowly things, went wrong.  You got your—­your nerves.”

Loder changed his position with something of abruptness.

She misconstrued the action.

“Please don’t think I want to be disagreeable,” she said, hastily.  “I don’t.  I’m only trying to make you understand why—­why I lost heart.”

“I think I know,” Loder’s voice broke in involuntarily.  “Things got worse—­then still worse.  You found interference useless.  At last you ceased to have a husband.”

“Until a week ago.”  She glanced up quickly.  Absorbed in her own feelings, she had seen nothing extraordinary in his words.

But at hers, Loder changed color.

“It’s the most incredible thing in the world,” she said.  “It’s quite incredible, and yet I can’t deny it.  Against all my reason, all my experience, all my inclination I seem to feel in the last week something of what I felt at first.”  She stopped with an embarrassed laugh.  “It seems that, as if by magic, life has been picked up where I dropped it six years ago.”  Again she stopped and laughed.