eat haste. But before she left the theatre she bade every one "good
night" with more than her usual kindliness, not because she did not
expect to see them all on Monday,--it was a Saturday night,--but
because, in her inexplicably sad humour, she felt an irresistible
desire to be at peace with the world, and a still deeper desire to
feel herself beloved by those about her.

Then she entered her carriage and drove hurriedly home to the tiny
apartment where she lived quite alone.

On the supper table lay a note.

She shivered as she took it up. It was a handwriting she had been
accustomed to see once a year only, in one simple word of greeting,
always the same word, which every year in eighteen had come to her on
New Year's wherever she was.

But this was October.

She sat perfectly still for some minutes, and then resolutely opened
the letter, and read:

"Madge:--I am so afraid that my voice coming to you, not
only across so many years, but from another world, may shock
you, that I am strongly tempted not to keep my word to you,
yet, judging you by myself, I feel that perhaps this will be
less painful than the thought that I had passed forgetful of
you, or changed toward you. You were a mere girl when we
mutually promised, that though it was Fate that our paths
should not be the same, and honorable that we should keep
apart, we would not pass out of life, whatever came, without
a farewell word,--a second saying 'good-bye.'"

"It is my fate to say it. It is now God's will. Before it
was yours. It is eighteen years since you chose my honor to
your happiness and mine. To-day you are a famous woman. That
is the consolation I have found in your decision. I
sometimes wonder if Fame will always make up to you for the
rest. A woman's way is peculiar--and right, I suppose. I
have never changed. My son has been a second consolation,
and that, too, in spite of the fact that, had he never been
born, your decision might have been so different. He is a
young man now, strangely like what I was, when as a child,
you first knew me, and he has always been my confidant. In
those first days of my banishment from you I kept from
crying my agony from the housetops by whispering it to him.
His uncomprehending ears were my sole confessional. His
mother cared little for his companionship, and her
invalidism