herself in foreign
towns; and she had thereby proclaimed that she had no guilty sense of
responsibility, no burden on her conscience; that she had only behaved
as a thousand other women would have behaved, and without any cruel
intention at all. But she knew all the same that the spectators of what
had happened held her for a cruel woman, and that there were many, and
those the best, who saw her come with distaste and go without regret;
and it was under that knowledge, in spite of indomitable pride, that her
beauty had withered in a year.

And at the moment when the smart of what had happened to her--personally
and socially--was at its keenest; when, after a series of quarrels, she
had separated herself from the imperious mother who had been her evil
genius throughout her marriage, she had made friends, unexpectedly,
owing to a chance meeting at a picture-gallery, with Daphne Floyd. Some
element in Daphne's nature had attracted and disarmed her. The proud,
fastidious woman had given the girl her confidence--eagerly,
indiscriminately. She had poured out upon her all that wild philosophy
of "rights" which is still struggling in the modern mind with a
crumbling ethic and a vanishing religion. And she had found in Daphne a
warm and passionate ally. Daphne was nothing if not "advanced." She
shrank, as Roger Barnes had perceived, from no question; she had never
been forbidden, had never forbidden herself, any book that she had a
fancy to read; and she was as ready to discuss the relative divorce laws
of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, as the girls of fifty years ago were
to talk of the fashions, or "Evangeline." In any disputed case,
moreover, between a man and a woman, Daphne was hotly and instinctively
on the side of the woman. She had thrown herself, therefore, with ardour
into the defence of Mrs. Verrier; and for her it was not the wife's
desertion, but the husband's suicide which had been the cruel and
indefensible thing. All these various traits and liberalisms had made
her very dear to Madeleine Verrier.

Now, as that lady sat in her usual drooping attitude, wondering what
Washington would be like for her when even Daphne Floyd was gone from
it, the afternoon sun stole through the curtains of the window on the
street and touched some of the furniture and engravings in the inner
drawing-room. Suddenly Mrs. Verrier started in her chair. A face had
emerged thrown out upon the shadows by the sun-finger--the countenance