pa's study and went away. And in a
moment there was the sound of the front door shutting.

Was it over, then? Was the parting of lovers so brief, so final?...

Cally started, as from a trance. She ran out of the study and through
the dark library to the drawing-room and the front windows. Just in
time, she stood behind the curtains, and caught a last glimpse of
Canning's receding back. Brave and dear it looked, departing.

Over and over she said to herself: "He's gone ... Hugo's gone ... He has
thrown me over ..."

Gone was the prince of lovers. Calamity fell upon calamity. It would be
better to be dead. And suddenly all that was hard and resisting in the
girl broke with the taut strain, broke with a poignant bodily throe, and
she fell face downward into a great chair, weeping with wild abandon.

Here, within two minutes from the shutting of the door, her mother found
her.

* * * * *

So the beginning at the Beach touched its farther end. It touched with
the shocks of cataclysm, whose echoes did not soon cease to reverberate.
The word of the Lord came to Jack Dalhousie's father, and he would not
suffer in silence. Mr. Heth arrived at the House at ten o'clock that
night; it was the best he had been able to do, but it was too late for a
family reunion by an hour. The two women had fled away to New York,
probably on the very same train that bore back Hugo Canning. And behind
them Rumor of the triple head had already risen, roaring an astonishment
and a proverb.

XXII

One summer in the Old Hotel; of the World's wagging on,
Kern Garland, and Prince Serge Suits; of how Kern leaves
the Works for Good and has a Dream about Mr. V.V.'s
Beautiful Lady; of how Mr. V.V. came to sit in the still
Watches and think again of John the Baptist.

And still the world wagged on.

Calamity befell one House out of many, and the natural cycles did not
stir a hair's breadth. The evening and the morning were another day, and
another and another. May ran indifferent out, with blue skies and a
maddening sequence of "Continued Heat." Then presently the long days had
reached their length, loitered awhile, turned slowly backward. And June
had become July, and midsummer lay fast over the half-empty town.

It was a summer that broke records for heat, and those fled from it who
could. But in the industrious backwaters of towns, where steady work
means steady bread, it is the