fallen lines, its soft pallor, its look of
fading sweetness. She had laid her youth down on the altar of her love,
while he had used love, as he had used life, merely to feed the flame of
the unconquerable egoism which burned like genius within him.

He came in, brushing a few flakes of snow from his sleeve, and it seemed
to her that the casual kindness of his kiss fell like ice on her cheek
as he greeted her. It was almost three months since he had seen her, for
he had been unable to come home for Christmas, but from his manner he
might have parted from her only yesterday. He was kind--he had never
been kinder--but she would have preferred that he should strike her.

"Are you all right?" he asked gently, turning to warm his hands at the
fire. "Beastly cold, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes, I am all right, dear. The play is a great success, isn't it?"

His face clouded. "As such things go. It's awful rot, but it's made a
hit--there's no doubt of that."

"And the other one, 'The Home'--when is the first night of that?"

"Next week. On Thursday. I must get back for it."

"And I am to go with you, am I not? I have looked forward to it all
winter."

At the sound of her anxious question, a contraction of pain, the look of
one who has been touched on the raw, crossed his face. Though she was
not penetrating enough to discern it, there were times when his pity for
her amounted almost to a passion, and at such moments he was conscious
of a blind anger against Life, as against some implacable personal
force, because it had robbed him of the hard and narrow morality on
which his ancestors leaned. The scourge of a creed which had kept even
Cyrus walking humbly in the straight and flinty road of Calvinism,
appeared to him in such rare instants as one of the spiritual luxuries
which a rationalistic age had destroyed; for it is not granted to man to
look into the heart of another, and so he was ignorant alike of the
sanctities and the passions of Cyrus's soul. What he felt was merely
that the breaking of the iron bonds of the old faith had weakened his
powers of resistance as inevitably as it had liberated his thought. The
sound of his own rebellion was in his ears, and filled with the noise of
it, he had not stopped to reflect that the rebellion of his ancestors
had seemed less loud only because it was inarticulate. Was it really
that his generation had lost the capacity for endurance, the spiritual
grace of self-denial, or was it simp