came in, dressed for their walk, and under Laura's anxious eyes he
picked up the newspaper and held it out with a careless: "Look at this!"

His cousin's glance flew down the column, and he saw the tremor of her
lashes as she read. Then she lifted her head. "But you'll be free!" Her
face was as vivid as a flower.

"Free? I'm free now, as far as that goes!"

"Oh, but it will go so much farther when she has another name--when
she's a different person altogether! Then you'll really have Paul to
yourself."

"Paul?" Laura intervened with a nervous laugh. "But there's never been
the least doubt about his having Paul!"

They heard the boy's laughter on the lawn, and she went out to join him.
Ralph was still looking at his cousin.

"You're glad, then?" came from him involuntarily; and she startled him
by bursting into tears. He bent over and kissed her on the cheek.

XXXII

Ralph, as the days passed, felt that Clare was right: if Undine married
again he would possess himself more completely, be more definitely rid
of his past. And he did not doubt that she would gain her end: he knew
her violent desires and her cold tenacity. If she had failed to capture
Van Degen it was probably because she lacked experience of that
particular type of man, of his huge immediate wants and feeble
vacillating purposes; most of all, because she had not yet measured the
strength of the social considerations that restrained him. It was a
mistake she was not likely to repeat, and her failure had probably been
a useful preliminary to success. It was a long time since Ralph had
allowed himself to think of her, and as he did so the overwhelming fact
of her beauty became present to him again, no longer as an element of
his being but as a power dispassionately estimated. He said to himself:
"Any man who can feel at all will feel it as I did"; and the conviction
grew in him that Raymond de Chelles, of whom he had formed an idea
through Bowen's talk, was not the man to give her up, even if she failed
to obtain the release his religion exacted.

Meanwhile Ralph was gradually beginning to feel himself freer and
lighter. Undine's act, by cutting the last link between them, seemed to
have given him back to himself; and the mere fact that he could consider
his case in all its bearings, impartially and ironically, showed him the
distance he had travelled, the extent to which he had renewed himself.
He had been moved, too, by Clare's cry of joy at hi