you take Shirley and pull out for Italy. Why not? A year there would do
you a heap of good."

She shook her head. "No, Monty. It isn't what you think. It's--here."
She lifted her hand and touched her heart. "It's been so for a long
time. But it may--it can't go on forever, you see. Nothing can."

The major had leaned forward in his chair. "Judith!" he said, and his
hand twitched, "it isn't true!" And then, "How do you know?"

She smiled at him. "You remember when that big surgeon from Vienna came
to see the doctor last year? Well, the doctor brought him to me. I'd
known it before in a way, but it had gone farther than I thought. No
one can tell just how long it may be. It may be years, of course, but
I'm not taking any sea trips, Monty."

He cleared his throat and his voice was husky when he spoke. "Shirley
doesn't know?"

"Certainly _not_. She mustn't." And then, in sudden sharpness: "You
shan't tell her, Monty. You wouldn't dare!"

"No, indeed," he assured her quickly. "Of course not."

"It's just among us three, Doctor Southall and you and me. We three have
had our secrets before, eh, Monty?"

"Yes, Judith, we have."

She bent toward him, her hands tightening on the cane. "After all, it's
true. To-day I _am_ getting old. I may look only fifty, but I feel sixty
and I'll admit to seventy-five. It's joy that keeps us young, and I
didn't get my fair share of that, Monty. For just one little week my
heart had it all--_all_--and then--well, then it was finished. It was
finished long before I married Tom Dandridge. It isn't that I'm
empty-headed. It's that I've been an empty-_hearted_ woman, Monty--as
empty and dusty and desolate as the old house over yonder on the ridge."

"I know, Judith, I know."

"You've been empty in a way, too," she said. "But it's been a different
way. You were never in love--really in love, I mean. Certainly not with
me, Monty, though you tried to make me think so once upon a time, before
Sassoon came along, and--Beauty Valiant."

The major blinked, suddenly startled. It was out, the one name neither
had spoken to the other for thirty years! He looked at her a little
guiltily; but her eyes had turned away. They were gazing between the
catalpas to where, far off on a gentle rise, the stained gable of a roof
thrust up dark and gaunt above its nest of foliage. "Everything changed
then," she continued dreamily, "everything."

The major's fingers strayed across his waistcoat, fumbling un