.

"It must be now or never," Mrs. Ansell insisted.

"I can't think so," Justine held out.

"Nevertheless--will you try?"

"No--no! It might be fatal."

"To whom?"

"To both." She considered. "If he came back now I know he would not
stay."

Mrs. Ansell was upon her abruptly. "You _know_? Then you speak with
authority?"

"No--what authority? I speak as I feel," Justine faltered.

The older woman drew herself to her feet. "Ah--then you shoulder a great
responsibility!" She moved nearer to Justine, and once more laid a
fugitive touch upon her. "You won't write to him?"

"No--no," the girl flung back; and the voices of the returning party in
the hall made Mrs. Ansell, with an almost imperceptible gesture of
warning, turn musingly away toward the fire.

* * * * *

Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had seen. A glazed
"sun-room," mosaic pavements, a marble fountain to feed the marble
tank--and outside a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to
take up and utilize--one could see how practically!--the overflow from
the tank. If one did the thing at all, why not do it decently? She had
given up her new motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted
herself in a hundred ways--if ever woman was entitled to a little
compensating pleasure, surely she was that woman!

The days were crowded with consultations. Architect, contractors,
engineers, a landscape gardener, and a dozen minor craftsmen, came and
went, unrolled plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued,
persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing, under Blanche
Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining influences of economy. What!
She was a young woman, with an independent fortune, and she was always
wavering, considering, secretly referring back to the mute criticism of
an invisible judge--of the husband who had been first to shake himself
free of any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche did not have to
say this--she conveyed it by the raising of painted brows, by a smile of
mocking interrogation, a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance
at the architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied,
resisted--then yielded to and signed; then the hour of advance payments
struck, and an imperious appeal was despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom
the management of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.

Mr. Tredegar, to his client's surprise, answered the appeal in perso