There is no news of my Dinkie. And that, I remind myself, is the only matter that counts.

Lois Murchison drove up to-day in her hateful big car. She did not find me a very agreeable hostess, I’m afraid, but curled up like a nonchalant green snake in one of my armchairs and started to smoke and talk. She asked where Duncan was and I had to explain that he’d been called out to the mines on imperative business. And that started her going on the mines. Duncan, she said, should clean up half a million before he was through with that deal. He had been very successful.

“But don’t you feel, my dear,” she went on with quiet venom in her voice, “that a great deal of his success has depended on that bandy-legged little she-secretary of his?”

“Is she that wonderful?” I asked, trying to seem less at sea than I was.

“She’s certainly wonderful to him!” announced the woman known as Slinkie. And having driven that 348 poisoned dart well into the flesh, she was content to drop her cigarette-end into the ash-receiver, reach for her blue-fox furs, and announce that she’d have to be toddling on to the hair-dresser’s.

Lois Murchison’s implication, at that moment, didn’t bother me much, for I had bigger troubles to occupy my thoughts. But the more I dwell on it, the more I find myself disturbed in spirit. I resent the idea of being upset by a wicked-tongued woman. She has, however, raised a ghost which will have to be laid. To-morrow I intend to go down to my husband’s office and see his secretary, “to inspect the whaup,” as Whinnie would express it, for I find myself becoming more and more interested in her wonderfulness.... Peter sent me a hurried line or two to-day, telling me to sit tight as he thought he’d have news for me before the week was out.

I suspect him of trying to trick me into some forlorn new lease of hope. But I have pinned my faith to Peter—and I know he would not trifle with anything so sacred as mother-love.