rtion from the cause, a conscript in which,
she had so ill-understood. The falling back into luxury, the
acceptance of those things which in her tentative, unrevolutionary
way she had always imagined to come into her right of possession,
had been very easy--very gentle--the drifting of a feather on an idle
summer wind. She had let herself be borne on it, using it, not as
an advantage, not as a step to lift her to a greater freedom and a
wider independence, but as a fit setting, a worthy environment to
this love which consumed the whole of her being and rode, the master,
with an unslacking rein, over all her actions.

If she had taken the situation as it was, faced the meaning of it
with firm lips and a steady eye, there would have been hope--more,
there would have been salvation for her. But frail, sensitive,
tender-hearted, little Sally Bishop was not of that blood, that
breeding was not in her bone. She took the threads, coloured them
one and all with that deceptive dye of the imagination, and wove a
romance out of the materials of a stern reality.

To every intent, to every purpose in her mind, she was a married woman.
The constant use of his name in the hotels where they stayed abroad
had fostered the delusion in her mind. That, in reality, she was still
Sally Bishop was a fact, obvious enough, patent enough, and one which
she was not so foolish as to try and force herself to forget; but
she was Sally Bishop only in name. So, in contrary comparison, other
women were wives only in name, yet had no husbands.

The true, logical state of the case never made its appeal to her.
She was too much of a romantic, living, as many women do, in a
cloudland of hallucination, until a lightning circumstance tears its
rent in the vaporous fabric and experience thunders in their ears.
Had she consented to the reasoning that she had but left the plying
of one trade in exchange for another; had she admitted the fact that
she had but abandoned one master for the service of another, there
would have been every chance that, if the end should come, she would
be able to take up the threads where they had broken off and wring
profit from the ultimate position. But no such thought entered her
mind. Emancipation was no goal for her ambitions. She sought for
chains to gyve about her soul and, in her relationship with Traill,
she fondly dreamed that she had found them. If the real aspect of
the case had forcibly made its way into her consider