d tortoise-shell.

It was nearly midnight. Outside, the dull rumble of London seemed a
sound, continuous, unvarying, as though it were the distant roar of a
world turning in some stellar space.

It was a great old house in Park Lane, heavy and of that gloomy
architecture with which the feeling of the English people, at an earlier
time, had been so strangely in accord. It stood before St. James's Park
oppressive and monumental, and now in the midst of yellow fog its heavy
front was like a mausoleum.

But within, the house had been treated to a modern re-casting, not
entirely independent of the vanity of wealth.

After the dinner at the Ritz, the girl felt that she could not go on;
and Lady Mary's party, on its way to the dancing, put her down at the
door. She gave the excuse of a crippling headache. But it was a deeper,
more profound aching that disturbed her. She was before the tragic hour,
appearing in the lives of many women, when suddenly, as by the opening
of a door, one realizes the irrevocable aspect of a marriage of which
the details are beginning to be arranged. That hour in which a woman
must consider, finally, the clipping of all threads, except the single
one that shall cord her to a mate for life.

Until to-night, in spite of preparations on the way, the girl had not
felt this marriage as inevitable. Her aunt had pressed for it, subtly,
invisibly, as an older woman is able to do.

Her situation was always, clearly before her. She was alone in the
world; with very little, almost nothing. The estate her father inherited
he had finally spent in making great explorations. There was no unknown
taste of the world that he had not undertaken to enter. The final
driblets of his fortune had gone into his last adventure in the Great
Gobi Desert from which he had never returned.

The girl had been taken by this aunt in London, incredibly rich, but on
the fringes of the fashionable society of England, which she longed to
enter. Even to the young girl, her aunt's plan was visible. With a great
settlement, such as this ambitious woman could manage, the girl could be
a duchess.

The marriage to Lord Eckhart in the diplomatic service, who would one
day be a peer of England, had been a lure dangled unavailingly before
her, until that night, when, on his return from India, he had carried
her off her feet with his amazing incredible sacrifice. It was the
immense idealism, the immense romance of it that had swept her in