"Denis--are you ill? _Has_ anything happened?"

He forced a smile. "Yes--but you needn't look so frightened."

She drew a deep breath of reassurance. _He_ was safe, after all! And
all else, for a moment, seemed to swing below the rim of her world.

"Your mother--?" she then said, with a fresh start of fear.

"It's not my mother." They had reached the terrace, and he moved toward the
house. "Let us go indoors. There's such a beastly glare out here."

He seemed to find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where,
after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost
indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces
away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly sorted heaps
of wedding-cards.

"They are to be sent out to-morrow?"

"Yes."

He turned back and stood before her.

"It's about the woman," he began abruptly--"the woman who pretended to be
Arthur's wife."

Kate started as at the clutch of an unacknowledged fear.

"She _was_ his wife, then?"