robbing--her wedding-march! No, not that; for while she stood, coldly
transfixed in centred self-absorption, she seemed to see a shapeless
mass of wreaths piled in the twilight of an altar--the dreadful pomp and
panoply and circumstance of death--

She raised her eyes to the man beside her; her whole being vibrated with
the menace of a dirge, and in the roar of traffic around her she divined
the imprisoned thunder of the organ pealing for her dead.

She turned her head sharply towards the west.

"What is it?" he asked, in the voice of a man who needs no answer to his
question.

She kept her head steadily turned. Through Fifteenth Street the sun
poured a red light that deepened as the mist rose from the docks. She
heard the river whistles blowing; an electric light broke out through
the bay haze.

It was true she was thinking of her husband--thinking of him almost
desperately, distressed that already he should have become to her
nothing more vital than a memory.

Unconscious of the man beside her, she stood there in the red glow,
straining eyes and memory to focus both on a past that receded and
seemed to dwindle to a point of utter vacancy.

Then her husband's face grew out of vacancy, so real, so living, that
she started--to find herself walking slowly past the fountain with
Langham at her side.

After a moment she said: "Now we have walked all around the square. Now
I am going to walk home; ... and thank you ... for my walk, ... which
was probably as wholesome a performance as I could have indulged in--and
quite unconventional enough, even for you."

They faced about and traversed the square, crossed Broadway in silence,
passed through the kindling shadows of the long cross-street, and turned
into Fifth Avenue.

"You are very silent," she said, sorry at once that she had said it,
uncertain as to the trend his speech might follow, and withal curious.

"It was only about that dog," he said.

She wondered if it was exactly that, and decided it was not. It was not.
He was thinking of her husband as he had known him--only by sight and by
report. He remembered the florid gentleman perfectly; he had often seen
him tooling his four; he had seen him at the traps in Monte Carlo,
dividing with the best shot in Italy; he had seen him riding to hounds a
few days before that fatal run of the Shadowbrook Hunt, where he had
taken his last fence. Once, too, he had seen him at the Sagamore Angling
Club up state.

"When