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 spoken aloud without volition, for the first time since Yvonne began talking.

She stopped short now, and fixed him with her glance. "You—know? Who—who told you, my dear? You didn't know before I went away—" Her eyes filled with sudden enlightenment. "You've talked to that Toby Jennings who brought me to the dance the night I met you!"

"No I haven't," Jock said quietly. "Do you think I'd gumshoe around trying to find out things you didn't want me to know? I stumbled on it accidentally. Demorest's picture in a newspaper, and something about his having left for California. The day you did. I knew you knew him—that time in Sherry's, remember?—but even then I wasn't—I didn't believe"

"You didn't want to believe, did you?"

Jock did not reply, and his eyes fell from hers, to her white fingers that played restlessly at her throat. He felt numb. A sort of mental paralysis, that enabled him to hear and see but not to think, seemed to have settled on him. "It's been just a lot of words," he told himself, "and they're true, yet they don't mean anything. I don't feel anything. Good Lord, what's the matter with me? I ought to feel something—one way or the other"

Yvonne's voice began again, rather breathlessly. "I'm sorry. But you'll have to believe it now, because it's so. I've been his mistress for over a year. He gave me that limousine, and these rings, and the clothes I have on, and he paid for my apartment. . . . I thought I had what I wanted. Money; and everything money buys. But you see, I didn't leave room in my calculations for one thing, Jock Hamill. I didn't know I'd ever meet you, and love you, and wish—oh, wish so!—that I'd kept myself for you. I'm realizing, a