st after that poignant revelation to Eglington--she wept, as she
had wept then, heart-broken tears of disappointment, disillusion,
loneliness; tears for the bitter pity of it all; for the wasting and
wasted opportunities; for the common aim never understood or planned
together; for the precious hours lived in an air of artificial happiness
and social excitement; for a perfect understanding missed; for the touch
which no longer thrilled.

But the end of it all must come. She was looking frail and delicate,
and her beauty, newly refined, and with a fresh charm, as of mystery
or pain, was touched by feverishness. An old impatience once hers was
vanished, and Kate Heaver would have given a month's wages for one of
those flashes of petulance of other days ever followed by a smile. Now
the smile was all too often there, the patient smile which comes to
those who have suffered. Hardness she felt at times, where Eglington
was concerned, for he seemed to need her now not at all, to be
self-contained, self-dependent--almost arrogantly so; but she did not
show it, and she was outwardly patient.

In his heart of hearts Eglington believed that she loved him, that
her interest in David was only part of her idealistic temperament--the
admiration of a woman for a man of altruistic aims; but his hatred of
David, of what David was, and of his irrefutable claims, reacted on her.
Perverseness and his unhealthy belief that he would master her in the
end, that she would one day break down and come to him, willing to take
his view in all things, and to be his slave--all this drove him farther
and farther on a fatal, ever-broadening path.

Success had spoiled him. He applied his gifts in politics, daringly
unscrupulous, superficially persuasive, intellectually insinuating, to
his wife; and she, who had been captured once by all these things, was
not to be captured again. She knew what alone could capture her; and,
as she sat and watched the singers on the stage now, the divine notes of
that searching melody still lingering in her heart, there came a sudden
wonder whether Eglington's heart could not be wakened. She knew that
it never had been, that he had never known love, the transfiguring
and reclaiming passion. No, no, surely it could not be too late--her
marriage with him had only come too soon! He had ridden over her without
mercy; he had robbed her of her rightful share of the beautiful and the
good; he had never loved her; but if love