te's chisel altered the features beyond recognition
and till true identity was gone? Yet Alexander Quisante was the man who
had put on her the shame for which she had sobbed under the tree on that
evening at Ashwood. Before such a seeming contradiction his penetration
stood baffled. She had said then that her present life would, she
supposed, go on right to the end, and had said it as though the prospect
were unendurable; now a new and to him unnatural resignation seemed to
have come upon her, just when her present life had shown that it was not
likely to go on right to the end.

"I've prayed my husband to give up," she said, "I don't beg you not to
give up. To begin with, you wouldn't listen to me any more than he did.
And then, I suppose, you're right for yourself."

"You're about the only person who'll say so."

"I daresay. I've learnt about you in learning about myself. And I can
feel it just as you do--Oh, how intolerably strongly sometimes!" She
added with a smile, "We've only just missed suiting one another," and
then, "Yes, but we have missed, you know."

"I don't believe it," he persisted, struggling to throw off the new doubt
she was thrusting into his mind. His thought was that, once she got free
of her husband, she would indeed be his. That he must hold to. It was
Quisante, not she herself, who made her now feel strange to him; and
Quisante's spell was not to last; her quiet certitude that her husband's
days were numbered carried conviction to him also. "But I won't talk any
more about it now," he said.

"No, it seems inhuman," she agreed. "I spend all my days cheating myself
into a hope that he'll get better. I know you don't like him, but if you
lived with him as I do, you'd come to hope as I do. Yes, in spite of all
you know about us; and you know more than anybody alive. I've not been
so--so disloyal--to anybody else." She smiled as she quoted the word
against him.

"One must admire him," said Marchmont.

May Quisante laughed at his tone almost scornfully. "The way you say that
shows how little you understand," she exclaimed. "It's not a bit like
that." She took a step nearer to him. "When it comes," she said slowly,
"I shan't shed a single tear, but I shall feel that my life's over. He'll
have had it all."

"God forbid you should feel anything like that," he said, looking up at
her.

She laughed again, asking bitterly, "Does God forbid what Alexander
wants--except one thing? And what I tell y