etly admired Cally for her suicidal madness. At any
rate, drying her eyes presently, she said:

"How Mary Page will gloat over this.... Well, we can't go on this way,
my child. We'll die if we don't have some diversion. Lord knows we'll
need all our strength for the fall."

And still later, she suddenly cried: "LET'S GO TO PARIS!"

To Paris they went; and there, occupying more fashionable quarters,
began to look about for pleasure. The looking required effort at first
and was scantily rewarded; but of course it was not long before the
women's spirits responded to the more hopeful atmosphere. Soon they fell
in with some lively people from home, the Wintons, who, being a peg or
two lower than the Heths in the gay world, made it almost indelicately
plain that they were completely unaware of anything's having happened.
To Paris also came J. Forsythe Avery.

And now, in the passage of the weeks, the mother and daughter were at
home again, with Carlisle finding that memory still had power to stab,
and Mrs. Heth stoutly girding herself for the great fight of her life,
and almost happy....

If it had taken the violent break to reveal to Cally how deeply Hugo
Canning had come into her life, it seemed to take this home-coming to
impress upon her how definitely he had departed. There was hardly
anything in the house that was not in some way associated with him, or
with her thought of him. Outdoors it was hardly better: wherever she
turned, she found, mementoes of his absence. Strange and sad to think
that he and she would ride these familiar streets no more. He had left
her alone, to find her feet again in a changed world as best she might.
Where was he on this day and on this, with whom making merry, her false
knight who could not love as he could fear the world's opinion?...

It was September, and people were beginning to troop back in numbers
from the holiday places of their desire. Cally's first days at home were
full of meetings, with those now seen for the first time under strangely
altered conditions.

She was not wanting in spirit, but she lacked her mother's splendid
pachydermousness. More than mamma, she had shrunk from this first
painful plunge, and now that it had come she was receptive to
impressions which quite escaped the older lady. Outwardly, indeed, as
she perceived with some surprise, the greetings of friends and
acquaintances were much as they had always been. But she was at once
conscious of a certain