e an hour had passed, she had
herself in hand once more, for she had deliberately forced herself to
face her own soul, and she believed that she could put her character
together again and accept the future without further luxation or
debility of will. But she made no attempt to close her eyes to the ugly
fact that in that future of interminable years there were only two small
stars of hope; and it required an effort of imagination to drag them
above the horizon,--her father's death and the return of Trennahan. Her
father belonged to a long-lived race, and Trennahan during an absence of
three years and some months had given no indication that he remembered
her existence; moreover, he had gone into exile for love of another
woman. But without the faint white twinkle of those stars the future
would be not a blank, but an infernal abyss, which Magdalena, without
the society of her kind, without talent, without occupation, without
religion, refused to contemplate. And she had all a woman's capacity for
fooling herself with the will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination.

Her eyes had been clear and her logic relentless so long as the man had
been within sight and touch, but his absence, combined with his abrupt
and final eviction from the toils of the other woman, had lifted him
from practical life into the realms of the imagination; in other words,
he was no longer so much a man as an ideal,--a soul whom her own soul
was free to await or pursue in that inner world where realities are
bodiless and forgotten.

She longed for the old comfortable irresponsible sensuous embrace of the
Church of Rome. Its lightest touch was hypnotic, its very breath a balm.
Why, she wondered bitterly, could she not have been given less brains,
or more? If her talents had been genuine, she would have had that
magnificent independence of religion and worldly conditions which only
art--and love--can create in the human mind. And if her logic had been a
trifle less relentless, she would have had hours of ecstatic
forgetfulness these last long years. Of course there was always the
Almighty Power to whom one could pray, and who certainly could grant
prayer if He chose. But it seemed to her an impertinence for ordinary
insignificant beings to importune this remote and absolute God, so
forbidding in His monotonous mystery. She had all the arrogance of
intellect despite her remorseless limitations. Had she been granted the
gift of creation,--in other words, a