“There is much that has happened that I do not understand,” she added.  “For the present, however, I shall try to dismiss it from my mind.  I am sure you will agree that it is right for me to give a year to being a mother; as I wish you to feel perfectly at peace in the meantime, I mention that it is my intention to be a mother only, and not a wife.  I am showing this letter to my husband before I mail it, so that he may know exactly what I am doing, and what I have decided to do in the future.”

“Of course,” he said, after reading this, “you may send the letter, if you insist—­but you must realize that you are only putting off the issue.”

She made no reply; and at last he asked, “You mean you intend to defy me in this matter?”

“I mean,” she replied, quietly, “that for the sake of my baby I intend to put off all discussion for a year.”

7.  I figured that I should hear from Claire Lepage about two days after I reached New York; and sure enough, she called me on the ’phone.  “I want to see you at once,” she declared; and her voice showed the excitement under which she was labouring.

“Very well,” I said, “come down.”

She entered my little living-room.  It was the first time she had ever visited me, but she did not stop for a glance about her; she did not even stop to sit down.  “Why didn’t you tell me that you knew Sylvia Castleman?” she cried.

“My dear woman,” I replied, “I was not under the least obligation to tell you.”

“You have betrayed me!” she exclaimed, wildly.

“Come, Claire,” I said, after I had looked her in the eye a bit to calm her.  “You know quite well that I was under no bond of secrecy.  And, besides, I haven’t done you any harm.”

“Why did you do it?” I regret to add that she swore.

“I never once mentioned your name, Claire.”

“How much good do you imagine that does me?  They have managed to find out everything.  They caught me in a trap.”

I reminded myself that it would not do to show any pity for her. 
“Sit down, Claire,” I said.  “Tell me about it.”

She cried, in a last burst of anger, “I don’t want to talk to you!”

“All right,” I answered.  “But then, why did you come?”

There was no reply to that.  She sat down.  “They were too much for me!” she lamented.  “If I’d had the least hint, I might have held my own.  As it was—­I let them make a fool of me.”

“You are talking hieroglyphics to me.  Who are ’they’?”

“Douglas, and that old fox, Rossiter Torrance.”

“Rossiter Torrance?” I repeated the name, and then suddenly remembered.  The thin-lipped old family lawyer!

“He sent up his card, and said he’d been sent to see me by Mary Abbot.  Of course, I had no suspicion—­I fell right into the trap.  We talked about you for a while—­he even got me to tell him where you lived; and then at last he told me that he hadn’t come from you at all, but had merely wanted to find out if I knew you, and how intimate we were.  He had been sent by Douglas; and he wanted to know right away how much I had told you about Douglas, and why I had done it.  Of course, I denied that I had told anything.  Heavens, what a time he gave me!”