they seemed! How remote
from her, indeed, all the amazing history of these past months! That,
too, belonged rather to a world of dream and books. What! these great
tragic complications and emotions had sprung up in her simple,
uneventful existence! had related themselves to a brick bow-windowed
house in the suburbs!

She gazed at the packet again, conscious that her fingers were
faltering. How mean, low, hateful to read letters that had not been
meant for others' eyes! And what purpose would be served by her reading
them? She needed no further proof of the intrigue that had been carried
on in the shelter of her own credulity and simplicity. Besides, she
could divine what passionate vows of love were written herein, and to
pry into them would be to renew her tortures beyond human endurance. She
feared and turned away from them as from a furnace heated seven times
hot. The packet dropped amid the masses of papers that encumbered the
desk. Her tears came anew, and she gave them full vent; a storm of
hysteric sobbing shook her convulsively.

When eventually the attack had spent itself, she sat there listlessly,
without the force to stir hand or foot. But her brain was working
feverishly, definitely recognising that her life was spoilt. She had
made her great cry of revolt in this mad dash and underhanded search;
better perhaps to have made it in the silent depths of her heart! Ah,
God, it was bitter, it was cruel! But what had she expected? Had she not
known from the beginning that she ought never to accept one so far above
her?--that she was not the ideal his heart would crave for, but that, at
the best, a deep secret dissatisfaction would rankle in him all his
life? Had she not steadily seen this, while yet a shred of sanity
remained to her? But it had all happened in spite of herself; she had
been stricken with blindness, and her clear-seeing mind had been
possessed with inexplicable folly. She--Alice Robinson!--and the thought
made her laugh out aloud--had wholly believed that this man sincerely
loved her! She laughed again and again, seized suddenly by the pitifully
comic spectacle she presented to herself--Alice Robinson, shy, awkward,
devoid of all the graces, lacking _savoir-faire_, neglected not only by
men, but even by her own sex: Alice Robinson, the granddaughter of a
carpenter, seriously beloved by an aristocrat with all the graces and
culture, an artist, moreover, for whom beauty was always the primal
appeal