, darling," said Haldicott--he went to her and took both her
hands, so that she must raise her head and look at him--"if I've made
fun of you when I was feeling horribly frightened, and called you
ridiculous when I found you as tragic and adorable as you were
grotesque, _that_ was the rope. Now I will take an hour, or a day, or a
whole week, if necessary, to make you believe it; but _I_ could have
committed suicide--I assure you I could--when I saw Oliver Ainslie come
into the room."

A FORSAKEN TEMPLE

CHAPTER I

MILLY

"It is the emptiness, the loneliness, the lack of response and
understanding," said Milly. "It is as if I were always looking at a face
that never really saw me or spoke to me. Such a mistake as I have
made--or as others have made for me--is irretrievable. An unhappy
marriage seems to ruin everything in you and about you, and you have to
go on living among the ruins. You can't go away and leave them behind
you, as you can other calamities in life."

Milly Quentyn and Mrs. Drent were alone this afternoon in the
country-house where they had come really to know each other, and Milly,
acting hostess for her absent cousin, had poured out Mrs. Drent's tea
and then her own, leaving it untouched, however, while she spoke, her
hands falling, clasped together, in her lap, her eyes fixed on vacancy.
The contemplation of ruins for the last five years had filled these eyes
with a pensive resignation; but they showed no tearful repinings, no
fretful restlessness. They were clear eyes, large and luminous, and in
looking at them and at the wan, lovely little face where they bloomed
like melancholy flowers, Mrs. Drent's face, on the other side of the
tea-table, grew yet more sombre and more intent in its brooding
sympathy. "Why did you----" she began, and then changed the first
intention of her question to--"Why did you--love him?" This was more
penetrating than to ask Mrs. Quentyn why she had married him.

The extreme lowness of Mrs. Drent's voice muffled, as it were, its
essential harshness; one felt in it the effort to be soft, as in her one
felt effort, always, to quell some latent fierceness, an eager, almost
savage energy. She was thirty years old, six years older than Milly
Quentyn. Her skin was swarthy, her eyes, under broad, tragically bent
eyebrows, were impenetrably black. Her features, had they not been so
small, so finely finished, would have seemed too emphatic, significant
as they we