drew the photographs from her bosom and handed them over. As
Eleanor took them and began mechanically to inspect them, she caught
an unconsidered trifle. Kate was not leaving the room. She had stepped
over to the cheval-mirror, which faced the bed, and was adjusting the
ribbon in her hair. Looking across the photographs through her lashes,
Eleanor saw that the counterfeit eyes of Kate in the mirror were
trained dead upon her.

She examined them, therefore, with indifference; she stopped in the
middle of her inspection to ask if Judge Tiffany were up yet.

"They're excellent likenesses," she went on indifferently. "That's a
good composition. I don't care so much for this one. That's a poor
pose." She had come now to the bottom of the pile. This last print was
one of those spirited profiles by which Muller, master-photographer,
so illuminates character.

"Oh, that's a wonder," cried Eleanor. "Such a profile!" Then, at the
thought how Kate might misinterpret this purely artistic enthusiasm,
she dropped her voice to indifference again.

"Won't you please tell Aunt Mattie that I will get up if I can be of
any use?" And she held out the package.

Kate packed up the tray and withdrew. Eleanor heard the muffled tap of
her heels in the hall. The sound stopped abruptly. It was fully a
minute before they went on again.

Kate, in fact, had rested the tray on a hall table, drawn out the
photographs, and run over them, looking at them with all her eyes. The
profile was at the bottom of the package. When she reached that, she
hesitated a moment; then, with a quivering motion that ran from her
fingers over her whole body, she tore it in two. Short as this
explosion was, her recovery was quicker. She glanced with apprehension
over her shoulder at the door of Eleanor's room, tucked the
photographs back in her bosom, and took up the tray again.

Eleanor, when the sound of the tapping heels had quite died away,
turned her face toward the wall and gave herself to thought. She had
gathered up the last strand of the tangled web. Nothing was left but
the unweaving.

First, his soul was not hers, as her soul was not his. That
impression, received in a crisis which, she felt, was to be the crisis
of her life, had grown to be an axiom. His youth, his vigor, the pull
of a stalwart vitality which made his coarseness almost beauty--that
had been the attraction. His spirit, so blazing but so full of
flaws--that had been the repulsion.

Di