her cheeks burning. She looked like a vivid Medusa. Her voice was loud and clamorous, the other people in the room were startled.

‘Please don’t call me Mrs Crich,’ she cried aloud.

The name, in Loerke’s mouth particularly, had been an intolerable humiliation and constraint upon her, these many days.

The two men looked at her in amazement. Gerald went white at the cheek-bones.

‘What shall I say, then?’ asked Loerke, with soft, mocking insinuation.

‘Sagen Sie nur nicht das,’ she muttered, her cheeks flushed crimson. ‘Not that, at least.’

She saw, by the dawning look on Loerke’s face, that