r again since the evening we dined with him?"

Her turn had come, and Corinna, for she was very human, planted the
sting without mercy. "Oh, very often. He was here a few minutes ago."

"Then it's true? Somebody told me he admired you so much."

Corinna smiled blandly. "I hope he does. We are great friends." Would
there always be women like that in the world, she asked herself--women
whose horizon ended with the beginning of sex? It was a feminine type
that seemed to her as archaic as some reptilian bird of the primeval
forests. How long would it be, she wondered, before it would survive
only in the dry bones of genealogical scandals? As she looked after Rose
Stribling's bright green car, darting like some gigantic dragon-fly up
the street, her lips quivered with scorn and disgust. "I wonder if she
thought I believed her?" she said to herself in a whisper. "I wonder if
she thought she could hurt me?"

The sunshine was in her eyes, and she was about to turn and go back into
the shop, when she saw that Alice Rokeby was coming toward her with a
slow dragging step, as if she were mentally and bodily tired. The
lace-work of shadows fell over her like a veil; and high above her head
the early buds of a tulip tree made a mosaic of green and yellow lotus
cups against the Egyptian blue of the sky. Framed in the vivid colours
of spring she had the look of a flower that has been blighted by frost.

"How ill, how very ill she looks," thought Corinna, with an impulse of
sympathy. "I wish she would come in and rest. I wish she would let me
help her."

For an instant the violet eyes, with their vague wistfulness, their mute
appeal, looked straight into Corinna's; and in that instant an
inscrutable expression quivered in Alice Rokeby's face, as if a wan
light had flickered up and died down in an empty room.

"The heat is too much for you," said Corinna gently. "It is like
summer."

"Yes, I have never known so early a spring. It has come and gone in a
week."

"You look tired, and your furs are too heavy. Won't you come in and rest
until my car comes?"

The other woman shook her head. She was still pretty, for hers was a
face to which pallor lent the delicate sweetness of a white rose-leaf.

"It is only a block or two farther. I am going home," she answered in a
low voice.

"Won't you come to my shop sometimes? I have missed seeing you this
winter." The words were spoken sincerely, for Corinna's heart was open
to all the w