efore the
fire, and spread out the centrepiece, which she was embroidering, in an
intricate and elaborate design, for Lucy's Christmas. It was almost a
year now since she had started it, and into the luxuriant sprays and
garlands there had passed something of the restless love and yearning
which had overflowed from her heart. Usually she was able to work on it
in spite of her suffering, for she was one of those whose hands could
accomplish mechanically tasks from which her soul had revolted; but
to-day even her obedient fingers faltered and refused to keep at their
labour. Her eyes, leaving the needle she held, wandered beyond the
window to the branches of the young maple tree, which rose, like a
pointed flame, toward the cloudless blue of the sky.

In the evening, when Susan came in, with a newspaper in her hand, and a
passionate sympathy in her face, Virginia was still sitting there,
gazing at the dim outline of the tree and the strip of sky which had
faded from azure to grey.

"Oh, Jinny, my darling, you never told me!"

Taking up the piece of embroidery from her lap, Virginia met her
friend's tearful caress with a frigid and distant manner. "There was
nothing to tell. What do you mean?" she asked.

"Is--is it true that Oliver has left you? That--that----" Susan's voice
broke, strangled by emotion, but Virginia, without looking up from the
rose on which she was working in the firelight, answered quietly:

"Yes, it is true. He wants to be free."

"But you will not do it, darling? The law is on your side."

With her eyes on the needle which she held carefully poised for the next
stitch, Virginia hesitated while the muscles of her face quivered for an
instant and then grew rigid again.

"What good would it do," she asked, "to hold him to me when he wishes to
be free?" And then, with one of those flashes of insight which came to
her in moments of great emotional stress, she added quietly, "It is not
the law, it is life."

Putting her arms around her, Susan pressed her to her bosom as she might
have pressed a suffering child whom she was powerless to help or even to
make understand.

"Jinny, Jinny, let me love you," she begged.

"How did you know?" asked Virginia, as coldly as though she had not
heard her. "Has it got into the papers?"

For an instant Susan's pity struggled against her loyalty. "General
Goode told me that there had been a good deal about Oliver and--and Miss
Oldcastle in the New York papers