l
vagueness of light.

Though it was twenty years since she had first seen Laura Wilde as a
child of ten, the meeting came to her suddenly with all the bright
clearness of an incident of yesterday. She remembered herself as a weak,
bedraggled little girl, in wet slippers, who was led by a careless nurse
to a strange German school; and she felt again the agony of curiosity
with which, after the first blank wonder was over, she had stared at the
children who hung whispering together in the centre of the room. As she
looked a panic terror seized her like a wild beast, and she threw up her
hands and turned to rush away to the reassuring presence of grown up
creatures, when from the midst of the whispering group a little dark
girl, in an ugly brown frock, ran up to her and folded her in her arms.

"I shall love you best of all because you are so beautiful," said the
little dark girl, "and I will do all your sums and even eat your sausage
for you." Then she had kissed her and brought her to the stove and knelt
down on the floor to take off her wet slippers. To this day Gerty had
always thought of her friend as the little girl who had shut her eyes
and gulped down those terrible sausages for her behind her teacher's
back.

The maid brought the coffee, and while she sat up to drink it the door
of her husband's dressing-room opened and he came in and stood, large,
florid and impressive, beside her bed.

"I'm afraid I shan't get back to luncheon," he remarked, as he settled
his ample, carefully groomed body in his clothes with a comfortable
shake, "there's a chap from the country Pierce has sent to me with a
letter and I'll be obliged to feed him at the club, but--to tell the
truth--there's so little one can get really fit at this season."

To a man for whom the pleasures of the table represented the larger
share of his daily enjoyment, this was a question not without a serious
importance of its own; and while he paused to settle it he stood,
squaring his chest, with an expression of decided annoyance on his
handsome, good-humored face. Then, having made a satisfactory choice of
dishes, his features recovered their usual look of genial contentment,
and he felt carelessly in his pocket for the letter which he presently
produced and laid on Gerty's pillow. His life had corresponded so evenly
with his bodily impulses that the perfection of the adjustment had
produced in him the amiable exterior of an animal that is never crosse