over her. It was the simplest while the most absurd of
truths. Milly was falling in love; Milly was falling in love with Dick;
and she was frank and happy because she did not know it; and he did not
know it. Like two children with a fresh day of play and sunshine before
them, they were engaged in merry, trivial games, picnics, make-believes,
no thought of sentiment or emotion in them to account for the new
sympathy; but from these games they would return hand in hand, all in
all to each other, bound together in the lover's illusion and needing no
one else. Maps! Travels! Africa! Did they not see these things as silly
toys, as she did? What could Milly care for such toys? That she should
play with them, as if she placed tin soldiers and blew a tin trumpet,
showed the fatal glamour that was upon her; glamour only, a moonshine
mood of vague restlessness and craving. How dignify by the sacred name
of love this sentiment, all made of her weakness, her emotionalism, her
egotism, that swayed her now so ludicrously towards the man whom,
open-eyed, she had rejected and scorned for years?

Passionate repudiation of the debasement for Milly swept through the
stricken friend and mingled with the throes of her anguish for herself.
For how was she to live without Milly? How could she live as Milly's
formal friend, kept outside the circle of intimate affection, the circle
where, till now, she had reigned alone? Ah! she understood Milly's
nature too well; she saw that with all its sweetness it was slight.
Love, with her, would efface all friendships. Like a delicate, narrow
little vase, her heart could hold but one deep feeling. She would come,
simply, not to care for Christina at all. Would come? Had she not come
already? In her eyes, her smiles, the empty caressing of her voice, was
there not already the most profound indifference? And all the forces of
Christina's nature rose in rebellion. She felt the rebellion like the
onslaught of angels of light against powers of darkness; it was the
ideal doing battle with some primal, instinctive force. She must fight
for Milly and for herself. For she, too, had her claim. She measured
herself beside Dick Quentyn, her needs beside his. His life was
cheerful, contented, complete; hers without Milly would be a warped, a
meaningless, a broken life. Strangely, her thoughts, in all their
anguish, turned in not one reproach upon her friend; rather, her
comprehension, from maternal heights of love, so