her almost unconsciously, so spontaneous, so
interwoven with her every mood was her love for children; but the little
girl, being very proper for her years, did not smile back, and a stab of
pain went through Virginia's heart.

"Even children have ceased to care for me," she thought.

At the door, where she waited a few minutes for her taxicab, a young
bride, with her eyes shining with joy, stood watching her husband while
he talked with an acquaintance, and it seemed to Virginia that it was a
vision of her own youth which had risen to torment her. "That was the
way I looked at Oliver twenty-five years ago," she said to herself;
"twenty-five years ago, when I was young and he loved me." Then, even
while the intolerable pain was still in her heart, she felt that
something of the buoyant hopefulness of that other bride entered into
her and restored her courage. A resolution, so new that it was born of
the joyous glance of a stranger, and yet so old that it seemed a part of
that lost spirit of youth which had once carried her in a wild race over
the Virginian meadows, a resolution which belonged at the same time to
this other woman and to herself, awoke in her and mingled like a draught
of wine with her blood. "I will not give up," she thought. "I will go to
her. Perhaps she does not know--perhaps she does not understand. I will
go to her, and everything may be different." Then her taxicab was
called, and stepping into it, she gave the name not of a shop, but of
the apartment house in which Margaret Oldcastle lived.

It was one of those February days when, because of the promise of spring
in the air, men begin suddenly to think of April. The sky was of an
intense blue, with little clouds, as soft as feathers, above the western
horizon. On the pavement the last patches of snow were rapidly melting,
and the gentle breeze which blew in at the open window of the cab, was
like a caressing breath on Virginia's cheek. "It must be that she does
not understand," she repeated, and this thought gave her confidence and
filled her with that unconquerable hope of the future without which she
felt that living would be impossible. Even the faces in the street
cheered her, for it seemed to her that if life were really what she had
believed it to be last night, these men and women could not walk so
buoyantly, could not smile so gaily, could not spend so much thought and
time on the way they looked and the things they wore. "No, it must hav