doesn't easily give up...."

If he had known only Wentworth, it would have been wonderful enough
that he should have chosen her out of all Wentworth--but to have known
that other life, and to set her in the balance against it--poor
Margaret Ransom, in whom, at the moment, nothing seemed of weight but
her years! Ah, it might well produce, in nerves and brain, and poor
unpractised pulses, a flushed tumult of sensation, the rush of a great
wave of life, under which memory struggled in vain to reassert itself,
to particularize again just what his last words--the very last--had
been....

When consciousness emerged, quivering, from this retrospective assault,
it pushed Margaret Ransom--feeling herself a mere leaf in the
blast--toward the writing-table from which her innocent and voluminous
correspondence habitually flowed. She had a letter to write now--much
shorter but more difficult than any she had ever been called on to
indite.

"Dear Mr. Dawnish," she began, "since telephoning you just now I have
decided not--"

Maria's voice, at the door, announced that tea was in the library: "And
I s'pose it's the brown silk you'll wear to the speaking?"

In the usual order of the Ransom existence, its mistress's toilet was
performed unassisted; and the mere enquiry--at once friendly and
deferential--projected, for Margaret, a strong light on the importance
of the occasion. That she should answer: "But I am not going," when the
going was so manifestly part of a household solemnity about which the
thoughts below stairs fluttered in proud participation; that in face of
such participation she should utter a word implying indifference or
hesitation--nay, revealing herself the transposed, uprooted thing she
had been on the verge of becoming; to do this was--well! infinitely
harder than to perform the alternative act of tearing up the sheet of
note-paper under her reluctant pen.

Yes, she said, she would wear the brown silk....

III

ALL the heat and glare from the long illuminated table, about which the
fumes of many courses still hung in a savoury fog, seemed to surge up
to the ladies' gallery, and concentrate themselves in the burning
cheeks of a slender figure withdrawn behind the projection of a pillar.

It never occurred to Margaret Ransom that she was sitting in the shade.
She supposed that the full light of the chandeliers was beating on her
face--and there were moments when it seemed as though all the heads
about th