"You mean," said the amateur detective, "that your husband has deserted
you. That if it were not for the baby you would not try to find him. Is
that it?"

Mrs. Ashton breathed quickly and turned her face away.

"Yes," she whispered. "That is it."

There was a long pause. When she faced him again the fact that there was
no longer a secret between them seemed to give her courage.

"Maybe," she said, "you can understand. Maybe you can tell me what it
means. I have thought and thought. I have gone over it and over it until
when I go back to it my head aches. I have done nothing else but think,
and I can't make it seem better. I can't find any excuse. I have had no
one to talk to, no one I could tell. I have thought maybe a man could
understand." She raised her eyes appealingly.

"If you can only make it seem less cruel. Don't you see," she cried
miserably, "I want to believe; I want to forgive him. I want to think he
loves me. Oh! I want so to be able to love him; but how can I? I can't!
I can't!"

In the week in which they had been thrown together the girl
unconsciously had told Ford much about herself and her husband. What she
now told him was but an amplification of what he had guessed.

She had met Ashton a year and a half before, when she had just left
school at the convent and had returned to live with her family. Her home
was at Far Rockaway. Her father was a cashier in a bank at Long Island