hat to her; look like that. The tears rose to her eyes and rolled down
her cheeks as she lay straightly in the bed, on her back, the clothes
drawn to her throat, her hands clasped tightly on her breast. Hours had
passed and here she lay alone.

Hours had passed and she heard at last his careful step along the
passage, and the shock of it tingled through her with a renewal of fear
and irrepressible joy. He opened, carefully, the dressing-room door. She
listened, stilling her breaths.

He would come to her. They would speak together. He would not leave her
when she was so unhappy. Even the thought of Tante's wrongs was effaced
by the fear and yearning, and, as the bedroom door opened and Gregory
came in, her heart seemed to lift and dissolve in a throb of relief and
blissfulness.

But, with her joy, the thought of Tante hovered like a heavy darkness
above her eyes, keeping them closed. She lay still, ashamed of so much
gladness, yet knowing that if he took her in his arms her arms could but
close about him.

The stillness deceived Gregory. In the dim light from the dressing-room
he saw her, as he thought, sleeping placidly, her broad braids lying
along the sheet.

He looked at her for a moment. Then, not stooping to her, he turned
away.

CHAPTER XXII

If only, Gregory often felt, in thinking it over and over in the days of
outer unity and inner estrangement that followed, she had not been able
to go to sleep so placidly.

All resentment had faded from his heart when he went in to her. He had
longed for reconciliation and for reassurance. But as he had looked at
the seeming calm of Karen's face his tenderness and compunction passed
into a bitter consciousness of frustrated love. Her calm was like a
repulse. Their personal estrangement and misunderstanding left her
unmoved. She had said what she had to say to him; she had vindicated her
guardian; and now she slept, unmindful of him. He asked himself, and for
the first time clearly and steadily, as he lay awake for hours
afterwards in the little dressing-room bed, whether Karen's feelings for
him passed beyond a faithful, sober affection that took him for granted,
unhesitatingly and uncritically, as a new asset in a life dedicated
elsewhere. Romance for her was personified in Tante, and her husband was
a creature of mere kindly domesticity. It was to think too bitterly of
Karen's love for him to see it thus, he knew, even while the torment
grasped him; but