she
could not separate the outside sounds from the tumult within her brain.
"Now that I know the truth I must decide what is best to do," she
thought quite calmly. "As soon as this noise stops I must think it all
over and decide what is best to do." But around this one lucid idea the
discordant roar of the streets seemed to gather force until it raged
with the violence of a storm. It was impossible to think clearly until
this noise, which, in some strange way, was both in the street outside
and within the secret chambers of her soul, had subsided and given place
to the quiet of night again. Then gradually the tempest of sound died
away, and in the midst of the stillness which followed it she lived over
every hour, every minute, of that last evening when it had seemed to her
that she was crucified by Oliver's triumph. She saw him as he came
towards her down the shining corridor, easy, brilliant, impressive, a
little bored by his celebrity, yet with the look of vital well-being, of
second youth, which separated and distinguished him from the curious
gazers among whom he moved. She saw him opposite to her during the long
dinner, which she could not eat; she saw him beside her in the car which
carried them to the theatre; and clearer than ever, as if a burning iron
had seared the memory into her brain, she saw him lean on the railing of
the box, with his eyes on the stage where Margaret Oldcastle, against
the lowered curtain, smiled her charming smile at the house. It had been
a wonderful night, and through it all she had felt the iron nails of her
crucifixion driven into her soul.

Breaking away from that chill of terror with which she had awakened,
she left the bed and went over to the window, where she drew the heavy
curtains aside. In Fifth Avenue the electric lights sparkled like frost
on the pavement, while beyond the roofs of the houses the first
melancholy glow of a winter's sunrise was suffusing the sky with red.
While she watched it, a wave of unutterable loneliness swept over
her--of that profound spiritual loneliness which comes to one at dawn in
a great city, when knowledge of the sleeping millions within reach seems
only to intensify the fact of individual littleness and isolation. She
felt that she stood alone, not merely in the world, but in the universe;
and the thought that Oliver slept there in the next room made more
poignant this feeling, as though she were solitary and detached in the
midst of limitle