ty, immorality--well, was she not
to blame for it? Was ever a better boy than Gerry, as she knew him, to
the day they parted? It was her fault or misfortune that had cast
him all adrift. As to that troublesome question of a possible wife
elsewhere, in the land of his oblivion, she had quite made up her mind
about that. Every effort had been made to find such a one, and failed.
If she reappeared, it would be her own duty to surrender Fenwick--if he
wished to go back. If he did not, and his other wife wished to be free,
surely in the _chicane_ of the law-courts there must be some shuffle
that could be for once made useful to a good end.

Mrs. Nightingale had reasoned it all out in cold blood, and she was,
as we have told you, a strong woman. But had she really taken her own
measure? Could she sit there much longer; with him beside her, and his
words of twenty years ago sounding in her ears; almost the feeling of
the kisses she had so dutifully pointed out the lawlessness, and
allowed the repetition of, in that old forgotten time--forgotten by
him, never by her! Was it possible to bear, without crying out, the
bewilderment of a mixed existence such as that his presence and
identity forced upon her, wrenching her this way and that, interweaving
the woof of _then_ with the weft of _now_, even as in that labyrinth of
musical themes and phrases in the other room they crossed and recrossed
one another at the bidding of each instrument as its turn came to tell
its tale? Her brain reeled and her heart ached under the intolerable
stress. Could she still hold on, or would she be, after all, driven
to make some excuse, and run for the solitude of her own room to live
down the tension as best she might alone?

The music itself came to her assistance. Its triumphant strength, in
an indescribable outburst of hope or joy or mastery of Fate, as it drew
near to its final close, spoke to her of the great ocean that lies
beyond the crabbed limits of our stinted lives, the boundless sea our
rivulets of life steal down to, to be lost in; and while it lasted made
it possible for her to be still. She took her eyes from Fenwick, and
waited. When she raised them again, in the silence Op. 999 came to an
end in, she saw that he had moved. His face had gone into his hands;
and as she looked up, his old action of rubbing them into his loose
hair, and shaking it, had come back, and his strong identity with his
boyhood, dependent on the chance of a mo