d of the old
dog, who was smelling her shoes. The woman said:

"And, of course, I can't give you his address, because he's gone to
foreign parts."

With a murmur, of whose sense she knew nothing, Barbara hurried out into
the sunshine. Was she glad? Was she sorry? At the corner of the street
she turned and looked back; the two heads, of the woman and the dog, were
there still, poked out through the doorway.

A horrible inclination to laugh seized her, followed by as horrible a
desire to cry.

CHAPTER XXVI

By the river the West wind, whose murmuring had visited Courtier and
Miltoun the night before, was bringing up the first sky of autumn.
Slow-creeping and fleecy grey, the clouds seemed trying to overpower a
sun that shone but fitfully even thus early in the day. While Audrey
Noel was dressing sunbeams danced desperately on the white wall, like
little lost souls with no to-morrow, or gnats that wheel and wheel in
brief joy, leaving no footmarks on the air. Through the chinks of a side
window covered by a dark blind some smoky filaments of light were
tethered to the back of her mirror. Compounded of trembling grey
spirals, so thick to the eye that her hand felt astonishment when it
failed to grasp them, and so jealous as ghosts of the space they
occupied, they brought a moment's distraction to a heart not happy. For
how could she be happy, her lover away from her now thirty hours, without
having overcome with his last kisses the feeling of disaster which had
settled on her when he told her of his resolve. Her eyes had seen deeper
than his; her instinct had received a message from Fate.

To be the dragger-down, the destroyer of his usefulness; to be not the
helpmate, but the clog; not the inspiring sky, but the cloud! And because
of a scruple which she could not understand! She had no anger with that
unintelligible scruple; but her fatalism, and her sympathy had followed
it out into his future. Things being so, it could not be long before he
felt that her love was maiming him; even if he went on desiring her, it
would be only with his body. And if, for this scruple, he were capable
of giving up his public life, he would be capable of living on with her
after his love was dead! This thought she could not bear. It stung to
the very marrow of her nerves. And yet surely Life could not be so cruel
as to have given her such happiness meaning to take it from her! Surely
her love was not to be only o