more
than three years and a bend in the road had shown it stretching across
her path. True, it was only a shadow. He had said nothing whatever
about leaving her; had not even suggested it in the slightest word
he had uttered. She must pass through the shadow, then; but what lay
upon the other side was beyond her knowledge, though not beyond her
fear.

To drive the apprehensions from her mind, she rose suddenly,
shrugging shoulders, as though her blood were cold, and went to the
piano. Without thinking, she sat down, began to play; then her hands
lifted from the keys as if they burnt her touch. She had as suddenly
remembered. Traill was below. For a moment longer she sat there, just
touching, feeling the notes with the tips of her fingers--listening
to the sounds in her mind--then she rose, standing motionless,
attentive to all the little noises in the room below.

She heard the clink of a glass. He was taking his whisky. The sound
indicated that he would soon be going to bed. She glanced at the clock,
ticking daintily on her mantelpiece. It was just after eleven.
Thoughts, calculations began to wander to her mind. Downstairs, he
had said good night, kissed her--gently, as he always did--and opened
the door for her as she came upstairs. But then he did that every
night. Every evening he kissed her, every evening he said good night;
but then perhaps, some half-hour later, she would hear him mounting
the stairs to her room, and her heart would hammer like steel upon
an anvil until he had knocked at her door and she had whispered--"Come
in."

Would he come up that evening, she wondered. Two weeks now had passed
since he had been to her thus, and so her mind--searching, as it would
seem, for its trouble--intuitively connected the circumstance with
this event of the settlement. So she drove herself to judge him by
the lowest standards--those standards to which a woman at last
resorts when she thinks she sees the waning of her influence. That
in the heart of them they seldom put first, but last. Yet in the
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is, in a man, the soonest to
come and the soonest to go, while fondness, caring and affection may
remain behind, untouched by its departure. The beast in the every
man has little to do with the intellect, and it is with his intellect,
above all things, that he loves truest and most of all.

But here Sally fell into that most common of women's mistakes. She
judged him by his passio