tood a little screened from the brilliant crowd in
which she took such innocent pleasure. "How I wish Miss Willy could be
here," she thought, for it was impossible for her to feel perfect
enjoyment while there existed the knowledge that another person would
have found even greater delight in the scene than she was finding
herself. "How gay they all look--and there are not any old people.
Everybody, even the white-haired women, dress as if they were girls. I
wonder what it is that gives them all this gloss as if they had been
polished, the same gloss that has come on Oliver since he has been so
successful? What a short time he stayed. He is coming back already, and
every single person is turning to look at him."

Then a voice beyond the palm spoke as distinctly as if the words were
uttered into her ear. "That's Treadwell over there--a good-looking man,
isn't he?--but have you seen the dowdy, middle-aged woman he is married
to? It's a pity that all great men marry young--and now they say, you
know, that he is madly in love with Margaret Oldcastle----"

CHAPTER V

BITTERNESS

In the night, after a restless sleep, she awoke in terror. A hundred
incidents, a hundred phrases, looks, gestures, which she had thought
meaningless until last evening, flashed out of the darkness and hung
there, blazing, against the background of the night. Yesterday these
things had appeared purposeless; and now it seemed to her that only her
incredible blindness, only her childish inability to face any painful
fact until it struck her between the eyes, had kept her from discovering
the truth before it was thrust on her by the idle chatter of strangers.
A curious rigidity, as if she had been suddenly paralyzed, passed from
her heart, which seemed to have ceased beating, and crept through her
limbs to her motionless hands and feet. Though she longed to call out
and awaken Oliver, who, complaining of insomnia, spent the night in the
adjoining room, this immobility, which was like the graven immobility of
death, held her imprisoned there as speechless and still as if she lay
in her coffin. Only her brain seemed on fire, so pitilessly, so horribly
alive had it become.

From the street beyond the dim square of the window, across which the
curtains were drawn, she could hear the ceaseless passing of carriages
and motor cars; but her thoughts had grown so confused that for a long
while, as she lay there, chill and rigid under the bed-clothes,