m.
Occasionally one of them stopped, exchanged the time of day and then
passed on. In each exchange Jones collaborated. Lennox said nothing. The
food before him he tormented, poking at it with a fork, but not eating
it.

Presently he asked for coffee, drank a cup and got up.

Jones, too, got up and, to stay him, put out a hand.

Lennox, treating it, and him, like a cobweb, went on.

Afterward, Jones thought of the Wild Women of whom AEschylus tells, the
terrible Daughters of Hazard that lurk in the shadows of coming events
which, it may be, they have marshalled.

Afterward he thought of them. But at the moment, believing that Lennox
would do nothing and realising that, in any case, nothing can be more
futile than an attempt to avert the inevitable, he was about to resume
his seat, when something on the floor attracted him. He bent over, took
it, looked at it and tucked it in a pocket.

Then, sitting down again, mentally he followed Lennox, whom later he was
to follow farther, whom he was to follow deep in the depths where the
Wild Women, lurking in wait, had thrown him.

XXVII

The Park that had taken Cassy and from which, at that hour, children and
nursemaids had gone, was green, fragrant, quiet. Its odorous peace
enveloped the girl who had wanted to cry. In hurrying on she had choked
it back. But you cannot always have your way with yourself. The tears
would come and she sat down on a bench, from behind which a squirrel
darted.

Before her the grass departed, the trees disappeared, the path wound
into nothingness. In their place was the empty vastness that sorrow is.
The masquerade that had affected her physically, had affected her
psychically and in each instance profoundly. It had first sickened and
then stabbed. There had been no place for sorrow in the double assault.
There had been no time for it either. Occupied as she had almost at once
become with the misadventures of another, she had no opportunity to
consider her own. Yet now the aspect that sorrow took was not that of
disaster. What it showed was the loneliness of the soul, solitary as it
ever is in that desert which, sooner or later, we all must cross. Vast,
arid, empty, before her it stretched.

Nearby, on the bench, crouching there, eager, anxious, wary, a squirrel,
its fluffy tail and tiny nostrils aquiver, watched her with eyes of
bead. From the desert she turned and seeing the little gracious thing,
stretched her hand. She would h