ss again.

* * * * *

Mrs. Carstairs' brother was the man whom Hilda Ryder had loved, Bruce
Cheniston himself.

CHAPTER VI

As a rule the psychological moments of life come and go so quietly that
their passing attracts little notice. Quite minor happenings give rise
to demonstrations of excitement, of joy, of loudly voiced approbation or
disappointment. But the moments which really matter in a life, which
mark an epoch or destroy a dream, pass as a rule so quietly that only
those whose dreams are shattered, or whose lives have been touched with
the glory of the immortal, know that for a brief instant Time has become
interchangeable with Eternity; that in the space of sixty fleeting
seconds whole cycles of life have been lived through, and a vast and
yawning gulf, in thought, in feeling, in spiritual growth or mental
outlook, has opened to divide this moment from the one which directly
preceded it.

Such a moment was this one in which the two men who were bound together
by so tragic a link came face to face in Chloe Carstairs' drawing-room.

Each had been quite sincere in his dread of any future meeting; but
whereas Bruce Cheniston had been the victim of as cruel a circumstance
as ever deprived lover of his beloved, Anstice was the more to be
pitied, inasmuch as to his own burden of regret must be added the
knowledge that through his premature action he had given another man the
right to execrate his name so long as they both should live.

For a second Anstice wondered, growing cold whether Cheniston would
refuse to shake hands with him. In his heart he knew quite well, had
always known, that he had not been to blame in that bygone episode; that
although he had done a thing which must haunt him for the rest of his
life by reason of its tragic uselessness, as a man in whom a woman had
trusted he had had no alternative but to act as he had acted.

Yet of all men on earth Cheniston might well question the necessity of
his action; and Anstice told himself with a fast-beating heart that he
would have no right to resentment should the other refuse to take his
hand, to sit at meat with the man who had deprived Hilda Ryder of her
share in the gracious inheritance of life in the world she had called so
beautiful.

For a second, indeed, Cheniston himself hesitated, checked in the
friendly greeting he had been about to bestow on his sister's visitor.
He had arrived late that eve