o her cry during those first moments of
intolerable suffering and loneliness? But Garth was not the sort of man
who, when a door has been shut upon him, waits on the mat outside,
hoping to be recalled. When she put him from her, and he realised that
she meant it he passed completely out of her life. He was at the
railway station by the time she reached the house, and from that day to
this they had never met. Garth evidently considered the avoidance of
meetings to be his responsibility, and he never failed her in this.
Once or twice she went on a visit to houses where she knew him to be
staying. He always happened to have left that morning, if she arrived
in time for luncheon; or by an early afternoon train, if she was due
for tea. He never timed it so that there should be tragic passings of
each other, with set faces, at the railway stations; or a formal word
of greeting as she arrived and he departed,--just enough to awaken all
the slumbering pain and set people wondering. Jane remembered with
shame that this was the sort of picturesque tragedy she would have
expected from Garth Dalmain. But the man who had surprised her by his
dignified acquiescence in her decision, continued to surprise her by
the strength with which he silently accepted it as final and kept out
of her way. Jane had not probed the depth of the wound she had
inflicted.

Never once was his departure connected, in the minds of others, with
her arrival. There was always some excellent and perfectly natural
reason why he had been obliged to leave, and he was openly talked of
and regretted, and Jane heard all the latest "Dal stories," and found
herself surrounded by the atmosphere of his exotic, beauty-loving
nature. And there was usually a girl--always the loveliest of the
party--confidentially pointed out to Jane, by the rest, as a certainty,
if only Dal had had another twenty-four hours of her society. But the
girl herself would appear quite heart-whole, only very full of an
evidently delightful friendship, expressing all Dal's ideas on art and
colour, as her own, and confidently happy in an assured sense of her
own loveliness and charm and power to please. Never did he leave behind
him traces which the woman who loved him regretted to find. But he was
always gone--irrevocably gone. Garth Dalmain was not the sort of man to
wait on the door-mat of a woman's indecision.

Neither did this Jack of hers break his crown. His portrait of Pauline
Lister, pain