here was the note of passion she herself had poured
out so recklessly? His personal magnetism, his urbane, affectionate
friendliness, the caressing vibrations of his voice, his delicate and
considerate dealing with the gaps of ignorance she daily revealed--all
this held her in an invincible spell. But the deep, irresistible
conviction for which her heart yearned was unmistakably absent in his
whole relation to her.

Perhaps some terrible struggle was going on within him. Was he recoiling
in terror sometimes from the thought of the mate he had chosen? Surely
at times he was arguing himself into acceptance and contentment. What
meant the strange, furtive glances he sometimes directed at her?--not
the soft glances of love, but glances bewildering, baffling! She watched
him with a supernaturally sensitive insight, appraising his every
expression, following the imagined see-saw of his doubts and
reassurances.

Yet when he had told her of his meeting with Lady Lakeden again, and of
the new portrait he had engaged upon, no shade of jealousy had arisen in
her. Her sense of the calamity that had befallen Lady Lakeden was so
infinitely distressing that she could have fallen upon her knees and
prayed. To lose a dear husband after only a few months of wedded
happiness!--what more crushing grief could a woman's destiny hold? She
shut her eyes and shuddered, as she tried to realise the depths of its
meaning. It seemed to her that no wife with the least spark of womanhood
could recover from such a blow; that sorrow and weeping must be her
portion for the rest of her days.

She redoubled her devotion to Wyndham, suddenly full of fear lest she
should have been betrayed into injustice to him out of mere morbidity.
And her mind lingered gently on the figure of this other woman whom she
had never seen, but to whom her heart went out in an impulsive flood of
love and pity. If only she could know her, and let her understand how
deeply she realised her grief! But Wyndham had made no response to her
first involuntary expression of this desire, and she was too diffident
to recur to the point again. Perhaps if she waited patiently he might
suggest such a meeting of his own accord. But the days went, and Wyndham
was silent.

And not only silent, but changed. "Yes, yes. He is changed in a hundred
ways," she cried, "though he does not know he has shown it."

If, for a moment, she had been willing to take refuge in the belief that
over-sensiti