And," here Doris grew grave, "I'll think of David Martin! I wish I could
love Davey enough to marry him as I feel he wants me to--and let him
blot out this ache for Merry." But that was not to be.

And Meredith wrote her letters to her sister and smiled upon her
husband--for after the third month of her marriage that was the best she
could do for either of them. All the ideals of her self-blinded life
were being swept away in the glaring flame of reality.

Thornton was still infatuated and went to great lengths to prove to his
pale, starry-eyed wife her power over him. He was delighted at the
impression she made upon the rather hectic but exclusive circle in which
he moved; but he dreaded, vaguely to be sure, her hearing, in a gross
way, references to his life before she entered it. So quite frankly and
a bit sketchily he confided it to her himself.

"Of course that is ended forever," he said; "you have led me from
darkness to light, you wonderful child! Why, Merry, you simply have made
a new and better man of me--I understand the real value of things now."

But did he?

Merry was looking at him as if she were doubting her senses. Things she
had heard in her girlhood, things that floated about in the dark corners
of her memory, were pressing close. Dreadful things that had been forced
upon her against her will but which she reasoned could never happen to
her, or to any of her own.

"You mean," she faltered gropingly at last, "that another woman has----"
She could not voice the ugly words and Thornton was obliged to be a