"Do you know, Alie, I've sometimes thought that you and Hector don't get on very well together."

Mollie, in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, sat on the edge of her sister's bed. Margery Brunton, inclining to the aggressive about her forthcoming infant, departed early; and the two Fullerfords had been talking for nearly an hour, quite unsentimentally, about frocks, parents, books, a theater or so.

"What makes you say that?" Aliette, shoulder-deep in bedclothes, looked up from her pillow.

"Oh, I don't know." The girl blushed; and there fell a moment's awkward silence, during which it flashed through Aliette's sleepy mind that perhaps Hector had been confiding their matrimonial differences to his sister-in-law. But she dismissed the thought: Hector's reticence, even about small matters, was proverbial in the family. Besides, the reason for Mollie's question was sufficiently obvious.

"We get on as well as most married people, I expect," protested Hector Brunton's wife.

"I'm afraid I'm a terrible sentimentalist," went on Mollie. "Sometimes," she blushed again, "I think I'm even worse than that. I've never met a man I liked well enough to marry. Though, of course, I've let two or three men make love to me. It's rather nice to feel that a man's fond of you." She hesitated, and broke off--Aliette being hardly the kind of sister to whom one confided one's love-affairs.

"Most women are awful rotters," said the girl, after a long pause. Aliette restrained the retort at her lips; and Mollie's naÏve revelations continued. "Most men aren't. They've got a higher sense of honor than we have. I found that out while I was nursing. Reading the women's letters to fellows who'd been gas-blinded. There was one, I remember, who wanted a divorce. She wrote: 'I'm afraid I haven't been playing the game while you've been away.' And she didn't seem a bit ashamed of herself."

"Did you read him the letter?" interrupted Aliette.

"No. But I wrote to the woman; and she wrote back, thanking me. Thanking me!" Mollie's voice rose. "She'd decided that 'after all, and especially as he was so bad, it would be better not to tell him. Would I burn her silly letter?' I think that's beastly." Her violet eyes kindled. "I'm not a prig. I don't believe divorce is wrong. But I do consider it dirty, when a woman or a man do--that sort of thing."

Aliette's face, smooth on its pillows between braided coils, gave no hint of the thoughts in her mind. Vaguely she resented an unmarried girl, or, in fact, any woman discussing "that sort of thing"; but her resentment, she knew, would only make the younger generation laugh. The younger generation of girls, as represented by Mollie, did not believe in squeamishness. Perhaps--Aliette seemed to remember that Julia Cavendish had touched on the subject in her last novel--the younger generation were no less virtuous because they faced facts instead of hiding their heads, ostrich-like, in the sands of innocence.

"I don't see," Mollie's decided voice closed the conversation, "why being in love should prevent one from playing the game."

She rose, gathered her dressing-gown round her, asked if she should blow out the candle, did so, and made for the door.

"By the way," said the figure silhouetted against the glow of the corridor-lamp, "I suppose there's a service at Key Hatch to-morrow afternoon. If there is, let's go. It's such a ripping little church; and I can't bear being preached to by Adrian."

"If you like, dear," replied an unguarded Aliette. But when the door closed and she lay alone in darkness, her mind reverted to its problem, to that peculiar omission of Ronald Cavendish's name.