bed, looking straight before
her. Her mind returned upon itself. She seemed to go back to that point
of time, just before Lady Cardington called, when she had the programme
in her hand and thought of the gossamer threads that were as iron in her
life, and in such lives as hers; then to move on to that other point of
time when she laid down the programme, sighed, and was conscious of a
violent desire for release, for something to come and lift a powerful
hand and brush away the spider's web.

But now, returning to this further moment in her life, she asked herself
what would be left to her if the spider's web were gone? The believers
in the angel? Perhaps she no longer included Fritz among them. The
impotence of his mind seemed to her an impotence of heart just then. He
was to her like a numbed creature, incapable of movement, incapable of
thought, incapable of belief. Credulity--yes, but not belief. And
so, when she looked at the believers, she saw but a few people: Robin
Pierce, Sir Donald--whom else?

And then she heard, as if far off, the song she would sing on the morrow
at Manchester House.

"Torna in fior di giovinezza
Isaotta Blanzesmano,
Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano:
Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."

And then she cried again, but no longer frantically; quietly, with a
sort of childish despair and confusion. In her heart there had opened
a dark space, a gulf. She peered into it and heard, deep down in it,
hollow echoes resounding, and she recoiled from a vision of emptiness.

* * * * * * *

On the following day Fritz drove her himself to Manchester House in a
new motor he had recently bought. All the morning he had stayed at home
and fidgeted about the house. It was obvious to his wife that he was in
an unusually distracted frame of mind. He wanted to tell her something,
yet could not do so. She saw that plainly, and she felt almost certain
that since their interview of the previous day he had seen Miss Schley.
She fancied that there had been a scene of some kind between them, and
she guessed that Fritz had been hopelessly worsted in it and was very
sorry for himself. There was a beaten look in his face, a very different
look from that which had startled her when he came into her room after
thrashing Leo Ulford. This time, however, her curiosity was not awake,
and the fact that it was not awake marked a change in her. She felt
to-day as if she did not care what Fritz had been doin