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Rh Here was Peter's opportunity of revealing his real status, and preventing all chance of future misunderstanding. It was not too late; but still it might be best and kindest to break the news gradually.

"You were partly right and partly wrong," he said: "that was the portrait of a lady I was—er—once engaged to."

Unless Peter was very much mistaken, there was a new light in her face, an added brightness in her soft gray eyes as she raised them for an instant before resuming her labors upon the wicker-chair.

"Then you mean," she said softly, "that the engagement is broken off?"

Peter began to recognize that explanation was a less simple affair than it had seemed. If he said that he was no longer engaged but married to the original of that photograph, she would naturally want to know why he had just led her to believe, as he must have done, that he was still a careless and unattached bachelor: she would ask when and where he was married; and how could he give a straightforward and satisfactory answer to such questions?