atic head on the pillow, said:

"You must go and rest, Lilla. I shall be all right now. How badly you
look! How I must have worried you! They shouldn't have spoiled your
party. You see it wasn't worth while."

She passed away at dawn.

It was a morning of unusual brightness. A high wind caught up and
scattered broadcast the petals from the Italian garden, as though that
spot had served its only purpose. Now and then a swift cloud cast a
shadow over the landscape, then passed on, leaving everything as
brilliant as before. The boughs of the trees tapped urgently against
the windowpanes, calling attention to the sparkling clarity of space.
And Lilla, sitting alone in her room, wondered, "Will she meet him out
there? Does fate finally relent? Or are those moments that she had
with him--so few, while others are allowed so many!--supposed to be
enough happiness for her?"

CHAPTER XIII

For a while Lilla remained in the house on Long Island.

She sat in the pergola holding on her lap a closed book, between the
pages of which she kept Lawrence's cablegrams and letters from London.
Toward sunset she rose and went down across the meadow to the brook,
where some willows leaned over the water. As the twilight gathered, a
smell of wood smoke made her think of camp fires; and casting a look
around her at the suave landscape she tried to picture the jungle.

Then, when she recalled their brief hours together, a filmy curtain
appeared to ascend before her eyes; and that relationship, which
because of her profound, psychic agitation had been almost dreamlike
while in progress, assumed a perfect clarity, a new value. And now,
with the dissipation of that haze cast over all her senses by his
nearness, she perceived him, himself, far more distinctly than when he
had been with her. "Ah, what was I thinking of to let him go!" She
felt that another woman, not cursed with her ineptitude in that crisis,
would have held him back.

"But you were cruel enough not to give up going of your own accord,"
she sighed in the twilight. And, turning wearily back toward the
house, she reflected that if she had been fatally weak he had been
fatally strong, and that, after all, those two antithetical defects
were strangely similar.

When she was most gloomy, Fanny Brassfield came to visit her for a few
days.

That vigorous blonde woman, ruddy from golf and thin from horseback
riding, with calm nerves and an endless fund of go