nothing to spend in
ridiculously disguising the fair body they were condemned to share.
Mildred certainly left behind her social advantages which both Ian and
Milly enjoyed without exactly realizing their source, while her
bric-a-brac purchases, from an eighteenth-century print to a Chinese
ivory, were always sure to be rising investments. But all such minor
miseries as her invasion might multiply for Milly, were forgotten in the
horror of the abyss that had now opened under her feet. For long after
that second return of hers, on the night of the thunderstorm, a shadow,
a dreadful haunting thought, had hovered in the back of her mind.
Gradually it had faded with the fading of a memory; but to-night the
colors of that memory revived, the thought startled into a more vivid
existence.

In the press and hurry of life, not less in Oxford than in other modern
towns, the Stewarts and Fletchers did not meet so often and intimately
as to make inevitable the discovery of Mildred Stewart's dual
personality by her cousins. They said she had developed moods; but with
the conservatism of relations, saw nothing in her that they had not seen
in her nursery days.

Ian and Milly walked home from dinner, according to Oxford custom, but a
Durham man walked with them, talking over a College question with Ian,
and they did not find themselves alone until they were within the
wainscoted walls of the old house. Milly had looked so pale all the
evening that Ian expected her to go to bed at once; but she followed
him into the study, where the lamp was shedding its circle of light on
the heaped books and papers of his writing-table. Making some
perfunctory remarks which she barely answered, he sat down to work at an
address which he was to deliver at the meeting of a learned society in
London.

Milly threw off her white shawl and seated herself on the old,
high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate
tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with
gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of
dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife
sitting in the penumbra, chin on hand, staring before her into
nothingness, like some Cassandra of the hearth, who listens to the
inevitable approaching footsteps of a tragic destiny. At last she said:

"I've got something awful to tell you."

Ian startled, dropped his pen and swung himself around in his pivot
c