said. "How sorry I am for you! How I want to comfort and take care of you all the rest of your life, so that it may be clear and white, as your true self would have it be! And--how glad I am that you're not a widowed Comtesse!"
She was in his arms still when a knock at the door roused them both from the first dream of real happiness the girl had ever known.
A servant brought a card. She took it from the tray and read it out mechanically: "Mr. George Gallon."
"Tell the gentleman----" she had begun; but before she could go further with her instructions George Gallon himself had entered the room.
"Well, Miss Carthew," he said, "I heard from an unexpected source that you were here, swaggering about as the widow of a French Comte. I needed a little holiday, and so I ran out to see whether you were a greater success as a Comtesse than you were as a typewriter in my office. Oh! I beg your pardon. You're not alone. I'm afraid I may have surprised your friend with some disagreeable news."
"Not at all," said Justin Wentworth calmly. "Miss Carthew has not only told me of that episode in her life, but how it became necessary for her to take up the position of a typewriter. Your treatment of her seemed almost incredible--until I saw you. No wonder it was necessary for Miss Carthew to adopt an alias, if this is the sort of persecution she is subject to under her own name. But in future it will be different. As Lady Wentworth she will be safe even from cads like you; and though she is not yet my wife, I'm thankful to say I have even now the right to protect her. When do you intend to leave Biarritz, Mr. Gallon?"
George opened his lips furiously, but snapped them shut again. Then, having paused to reflect, he said: "I am here only for an hour. I'm going on to Spain."
"Pray watch over your tongue in that hour," returned Wentworth.
Then George Gallon was gone.
"I'll worship you all my life on my knees," said Joan. "I'm not worthy to touch your hand. But I will be. I will be a new self."
"Only the best of the old one, that is all I want," answered her lover. "The past is like a garment which you wore for protection against the storm. But there will be no more storms after this."
"Because you have forgiven me, because you believe in me," cried Joan, "you will make of me the woman you would have me!"
"The woman you really are, or I would not have loved you," he said.
And so it was that Joan Carthew's career ended and her life began.
The Second Latchkey
XVII. Ruthven Smith's Eyeglasses
Chapter I.
A White Rose
Even when Annesley Grayle turned out of the Strand toward the Savoy she was uncertain whether she would have courage to walk into the hotel. With each step the thing, the dreadful thing, that she had come to do, loomed blacker. It was monstrous, impossible, like opening the door of the lions' cage at the Zoo and stepping inside.
There was time still to change her mind. She had only to turn now ... jump into an omnibus ... jump out again at the familiar corner, and everything would be as it had been. Life for the next five, ten, maybe twenty years, would be what the last five had been.
At the thought of the Savoy and the adventure waiting there, the girl's skin had tingled and grown hot, as if a wind laden with grains of heated sand had blown over her. But at the thought of turning back, of going "home"—oh, misused word!—a leaden coldness shut her spirit into a tomb.
She had walked fast, after descending at Bedford Street from a fierce motor-bus with a party of comfortable people, bound for the Adelphi Theatre. Never before had she been in a motor-omnibus, and she was not sure whether the great hurtling thing would deign to stop, except at trysting-places