go, and even her
own sex had had to admit her charm; now she was beginning to be played
out, and she knew it. Her triumphant personality always attracted
attention, even when prettier and cleverer women were present, but it
was a very critical attention she attracted now.

When the light faded she moved to the bed and began to brush out her
hair. The sun had set, and she had drawn the dark, narrow blinds; down
their edges showed the gleam of the outside world steeped in a cold
blue-green light like the depths of the sea, and the faded curtains
wavered slowly in the breeze like long swaying strips of seaweed.
Blanche, swathed in a pale wrapper and sitting on the bed whose
whiteness was dimmed by the greenish dusk, was suggestive of a stage
mermaid combing her locks upon a property sandbank.

She lit her lamp, and at once the gleam without turned a deep, soft
blue. She knotted her pale hair on the nape of her neck, and, chin up,
hands on hips, stared critically at herself in the glass, and, as she
looked her lips parted a little in pleasure. Snatching up the
hand-glass, she poised from one foot to the other, craning her neck to
see herself from every possible point of view.

"Yes," she decided, "I'll go. And then--a new life. Miss Blanche Nevill
will vanish into thin air, and hurrah! for Blanche Grey, who will
be--herself."

She slept, thinking of Ishmael and herself, as he of her, while in a dim
room, lying perforce motionless in her hot bed, a girl thought, with the
brain left clear amidst all her failing senses, of two boys who stood
as symbols of a happy time when life was unclouded by even the least
conscious hints of the creeping Thing. She felt, in her thick confusion
of tongue and ear and eye, more uncouth than she was, and not for any
good life could still hold for her would she have had either see
her--Killigrew because he had been fond of her, Ishmael because she had
been fond of him.

A week later Ishmael arrived back at Cloom. As he walked along on the
first evening after his return the feel of the country smote him as
never before. Ecstasy welled in him, clear and living; the strong, pure
air made him want to shout with joy. And more than the sight of the
swelling land, more than the feel of the springy turf beneath his feet,
or the wind on his eyelids, it was the smell of the country that woke in
him this ecstasy. Sweet as the breath of cows came its mingled fragrance
of grass and earth and of the fin