In the solitude of her room she took the resolve. Her troubles were multiplying; she, too, was in the current, the end of which was a pit⁠—a pit black and without bottom. Once already its grip had seized her, once already she had yielded to the insidious drift. Now suddenly aware of a danger, she fought back, and her hands beating the air for help, turned towards the greatest strength she knew.

“I want my husband,” she cried, aloud, to the empty darkness of the night. “I want my husband. I will have him; he is mine, he is mine. There shall nothing take me from him; there shall nothing take him from me.”

Her first opportunity came upon a Sunday soon afterward. Jadwin, wakeful all the Saturday night, slept a little in the forenoon, and after dinner Laura came to him in his smoking-room, as he lay on the leather lounge trying to read. His wife seated herself at a writing-table in a corner of the room, and by and by began turning the slips of a calendar that stood at her elbow. At last she tore off one of the slips and held it up.

“Curtis.”