er beautiful youth, shone from the canvas
splendid as a star.

How kind, how kind of Owen!... Her eyes filled as she gazed, comparing the
glowing, radiant face upon the canvas with the enlarged photograph of the
Mother in her habit that stood in an ebony and silver frame upon a little
table beside the bed. A worn "Garden of the Soul" lay near, and the
"Imitation" of inspired A Kempis. Both had been the Mother's gifts. The
Breviary and the Little Office of Our Lady had belonged to the dead.
Lynette had brought these treasured possessions with her from Harley
Street, leaving the ivory Crucifix hanging in its place above the vacant
pillow. So many sleepless nights she had known of late upon that pillow
that there were faint bluish-shaded hollows under the beautiful eyes, and
wistful lines about the mouth.

Since the revelation made to her by her own heart, when the heavy tress of
hair dropped from her bosom upon the unconscious breast above which she
bent, an insurmountable wall of diffidence and shyness upon her side, and
of stern, self-concentrated isolation on her husband's, had risen up
between them, dwarfing the barrier that was already there.

His writing-table lamp had burned through the nights, but she had never
ventured upon another stolen visit to Saxham's consulting-room. The memory
of that kiss she had put upon the velvety-smooth space above the broad
meeting eyebrows stung in her like a sense of guilt, and yet it had its
sweetness. She had claimed her right. The man was hers, though she might
never be his.... To know it was to realise at once her riches and her
poverty.

Out of a vague yearning and a formless, nameless pain had come to her the
knowledge of the true herb needed for her healing. The unsated hunger for
sympathy and love and loveliness, the loneliness that gnawed him, she
comprehended now. And as she looked about her at the dainty,
carefully-chosen furniture, and the exquisite old-world-patterned chintz
draperies, recognising what his care had been to please her, and how every
little taste and preference of hers had been remembered and gratified, a
sense of her own ingratitude pierced her to the quick.

She had parted from Owen without one tender word, without even one glance
of greater kindness than she would have bestowed upon a stranger. She
ached with futile remorse at the recollection of that frigid, distant
good-bye at Euston Station, when Lady Hannah's shrill laugh had jangled
through