of responsibility; and deep down, Quita knew herself to be more
like her brother in both respects than she quite cared to acknowledge.
For all her husband's conscientious suggestion that marriage was a
"complicated affair," she persisted in regarding it simply as the crown
and completion of their great love, a happiness to which they were
entitled by every law human and divine. The generations still to be
had not yet laid their arresting hand upon her. In her esteem, such
shadowy probabilities had neither right nor power to stem the new
imperious forces at work within her.

It remains to add that Eldred's avowal had not shocked or repelled her
as much as he had feared. For, among Michael's promiscuous intimates
in Paris, Vienna, Rome, she had seen and heard more than Lenox was
likely to guess of that enslavement to drugs and absinthe to which the
artist's temperament seems peculiarly prone; though she was far from
realising in detail the full horror and degradation involved. She
merely felt certain that--heredity or no--Eldred was, by the nature of
him, incapable of travelling far down that awful road; that with her at
his side to hearten and help him, he could not fail to free himself
from "the accursed chain."

But they must fight the battle together. That was the Alpha and Omega
of her thoughts. He had not yet measured the height and depth of her
love. Let her only make this clear to him, and he must give in; if not
to-night, at least before his leave was up. Years of living with
Michael had accustomed her to getting her own way in all essentials.
But she had yet to try her strength against the bed-rock of Scottish
granite underlying her husband's surface quietness; against the
terrible singleness of mind that cannot--even for Love's dear
sake--view harsh facts through a medium of rosy mist.

While she stood thus, trying to see into the darkness that shrouds the
coming day, even the coming hour, from inquisitive eyes, the drifting
vapour all about her paled from grey to white, from white to a gossamer
film; and finally uprose from the valley, like a spotless scroll rolled
backward by an unseen Hand, giving gradually to view a multitude of
mountains, newly washed; mountains that glowed with richest tints of
purple and amethyst and rose, in the level light of afternoon. And
Quita, being in a fanciful mood, saw in this "good gigantic smile" of
the rain-soaked earth a happy omen; an assurance that so would the