ke a battle horse
and fairly neighed.

"Because he saved your clothes? If it had been your life and you had
said 'Thank you' it would have been ample. But your clothes! Not mine;
the beast had not sense enough for that, but yours! I do hope you will
give that as an excuse to Sylvia!"

CHAPTER X

A VICTIM

Sylvia had gone from Newport. She was then at Lenox. It was there the
previous autumn that her interest in Annandale had begun. The interest
had so deepened that she gave him her heart. Never before had she
given that to anyone. Annandale had taken it and then, one night, he
had so bruised it that she thought it broken. He had written that he
had not meant to. His letter had been full of regrets, of
protestations, of bad grammar. Such things may palliate, but they do
not cure. Only time can do that.

Time is a strange emollient. In its mysterious potency it softens
without our knowledge. Suddenly a whisper, a breeze that passes, shows
that it has done its work. With Sylvia time was having its will.
Furtively she had found herself wondering, as Annandale had wondered,
how it should fare with her, and how with him, could the past be
effaced and the old days renewed. But those days were gone, she
decided. Though into that decision a doubt would creep, not indeed
concerning the departure, but concerning her attitude and the justice
of it.

Annandale had sinned. He had sinned wantonly, grievously. From an
atmosphere of vice--an atmosphere from which, under pain of her
displeasure, she had distinctly warned him--he had staggered to her,
its pollution about him, reeking with drink, talking abundantly about
nothing imaginable, and at her just remonstrance had become instantly
irritable, refusing almost to leave the house.

So had his condition and the spectacle of it shocked her that, for
awhile, memory of him and of it was repellent. In her own eyes she
felt degraded. That men drank, she knew. But in her sphere of life
they drank either moderately or else in haunts invisible to her. And
it was precisely from such a haunt he had come, a shameless haunt, one
that sullied her even to know of.

Yes, he had sinned, wantonly, grievously, almost unforgivably. Almost,
she reflected, but perhaps not quite. In his letter of protest and
regret he had told her that he remembered nothing, nothing whatever,
absolutely nothing at all, save one vague, brief vision of herself.
The rest, the beginning, the end, the inter-sp