then."

She watched the door close, then turned to the mirror in front of her
and looked at herself with eyes in which brooded a hundred thoughts and
feelings: thoughts contradictory, feelings opposed, imaginings
conflicting, reflections that changed with each moment; and all under
the spell of a passion which had become in the last few hours the most
powerful influence her life had ever known. Right or wrong, and it was
wrong, horribly wrong; wise or unwise, and how could the wrong be wise!
she knew she was under a spell more tyrannous than death, demanding
more sacrifices than the gods of Hellas.

Self-indulgent she had been, reckless and wilful and terribly modern,
taking sweets where she found them. She had tried to squeeze the orange
dry, in the vain belief that Wealth and Beauty can take what they want,
when they want it, and that happiness will come by purchase; only to
find one day that the thing you have bought, like a slave that revolts,
stabs you in your sleep, and you wake with wide-eyed agony only to die,
or to live--with the light gone from the evening sky.

Suddenly, with the letters in her hand with which she had entered the
room, she saw the white rose on her pillow. Slowly she got up from the
dressing-table and went over to the bed in a hushed kind of way. With a
strange, inquiring, half-shrinking look she regarded the flower. One
white rose. It was not there when she left. It had been brought from
the hall below, from the great bunch on the Spanish table. Those white
roses, this white rose, had come from one who, selfish as he was, knew
how to flatter a woman's vanity. From that delicate tribute of flattery
and knowledge Rudyard had taken this flowering stem and brought it to
her pillow.

It was all too malevolently cynical. Her face contracted in pain and
shame. She had a soul to which she had never given its chance. It had
never bloomed. Her abnormal wilfulness, her insane love of pleasure,
her hereditary impulses, had been exercised at the expense of the great
thing in her, the soul so capable of memorable and beautiful deeds.

As she looked at the flower, a sense of the path by which she had come,
of what she had left behind, of what was yet to chance, shuddered into
her heart.

That a flower given by Adrian Fellowes should be laid upon her pillow
by her husband, by Rudyard Byng, was too ghastly or too devilishly
humorous for words; and both aspects of the thing came to her. Her face
became