is most possible is in a crowd. Go back to
your guests; I know, you see, whence you come; take up your part in
the play, the masque; be ready with your cues. It's all masks and
dominoes; what does the form or colour of it matter? Underneath it
all you are yourself, with your beautiful sorrow, your memories,
your transcendent happiness--nothing can touch that; what does it
matter?"

"Happiness!" she ejaculated, rather in wonder than in scorn, for in
spite of her great weariness she had been struck by the genuine
accent struggling through his half ironical speech.

"Most happy," he said, with a deep inhalation. "Haven't you an ideal
which life, with its cruelties, its grossness, can never touch?"

Then he added quickly, in words of Philip Rainham, which had flashed
with sudden appositeness across his mind.

"Your misery has its compensation; you have been wronged, but you
have also been loved."

"Ah, my friend!" she cried, turning toward the picture with a new
and more beautiful illumination in her eyes, "was it for this that
you did it?"

Oswyn said nothing, and Eve moved towards the door, discovering for
the first time, on her way, the sleeping child. She stopped for a
moment, and the other watched her with breathless curiosity,
uncertain how far her knowledge might extend.

And as she stood there, wondering, a great wave of colour suffused
her white face; the next moment she was gone, but in the light of
that pure blush Oswyn seemed to have discovered that her tragical
enlightenment was complete.

When she turned once more into the street, she had already set
herself gravely, with a strange and factitious composure, to face
her life. It stretched itself out before her like a great, gray
plain, the arid desolation of the road being rendered only more
terrible by the flowers with which it would be strewn. For suddenly,
while Oswyn had been speaking, she had recognised that after all she
would go back; the other course had been merely the first bitter
cry, half hysterical, of her grief.

By her husband's side, with the semblance of amity between them
still, utterly apart and estranged as they must in reality
henceforth perpetually be, it seemed to her that she could none the
less religiously cherish the memory of her friend because she would
turn a smiling mask to the world's indifference, wearing mourning in
her heart. And deeply as she had suffered, in the midst of her
remorse she could still remind herself