e
market and the table. There remained nothing for her to do, nothing even
for her to worry about, except her broken heart. Her friends she had
avoided ever since her return from New York, partly from an unbearable
shrinking from the questions which she knew they would ask whenever they
met her, partly because her mind was so engrossed with the supreme fact
that her universe lay in ruins, that she found it impossible to lend a
casual interest to other matters. She, who had effaced herself for a
lifetime, found suddenly that she could not see beyond the immediate
presence of her own suffering.

Usually she stayed closely indoors through the summer days, but several
times, at the hour of dusk, she went out alone and wandered for hours
about the streets which were associated with her girlhood. In High
Street, at the corner where she had first seen Oliver, she stood one
evening until Miss Priscilla, who had caught sight of her from the porch
of the Academy (which, owing to the changing fashions in education and
the infirmities of the teacher, was the Academy no longer), sent out her
negro maid to beg her to come in and sit with her. "No, I'm only looking
for something," Virginia had answered, while she hurried back past the
church and down the slanting street to the twelve stone steps which led
up the terraced hillside at the rectory. Here, in the purple summer
twilight, spangled with fireflies, she felt for a minute that her youth
was awaiting her; and opening the gate, she passed as softly as a ghost
along the crooked path to the two great paulownias, which were beginning
to decay, and to the honeysuckle arbour, where the tendrils of the
creeper brushed her hair like a caress. Under the light of a young moon,
it seemed to her that nothing had changed since that spring evening when
she had stood there and felt the wonder of first love awake in her
heart. Nothing had changed except that love and herself. The paulownias
still shed their mysterious shadows about her, the red and white roses
still bloomed by the west wing of the house, the bed of mint still grew,
rank and fragrant, beneath the dining-room window. When she put her hand
on the bole of the tree beside which she stood, she could still feel the
initials V. O. which Oliver had cut there in the days before their
marriage. A light burned in the window of the room which had been the
parlour in the days when she lived there, and as she gazed at it, she
almost expected t