d for the third time, "I wanted to see
you--"

"I am afraid you are not well." Corinna spoke very gently. "Perhaps it
is not too late for tea, or may I get you a glass of wine? All winter
I've intended to go and inquire because I heard you'd been ill. It has
been so long since we really saw anything of each other; but I remember
you quite well as a little girl--such a pretty little girl you were too.
You are ever so much younger, at least ten years younger, than I am."

As she rippled on, trying to give the other time to recover herself, she
thought how lovely Alice had once been, and how terribly she had broken
since her divorce and her illness. She would always be appealing--the
kind of woman with whom men easily fell in love--but one so soon reached
the end of mere softness and prettiness.

"Yes, you were one of the older girls," answered Alice, "and I admired
you so much. I used to sit on the front porch for hours to watch you go
by."

"And then I went abroad, and we lost sight of each other."

"We both married, and I got a divorce last year."

"I heard that you did." It seemed futile to offer sympathy.

"My marriage was a mistake. I was very unhappy. I have had a hard life,"
said Alice, and her lower lip, as soft as a baby's, trembled nervously.
How little character there was in her face, how little of anything
except that indefinable allurement of sex!

"I know," responded Corinna consolingly. She felt so strong beside this
helpless, frightened woman that the old ache to comfort, to heal pain,
was like a pang in her heart.

"Everything has failed me," murmured Alice, with the restless volubility
of a weak nature. "I thought there was something that would make up for
what I had missed--something that would help me to live--but that has
failed me like everything else--"

"Things will fail," assented Corinna, with sympathy, "if we lean too
hard on them."

A delicate flush had come into Alice's face, bringing back for a moment
her old flower-like loveliness. Her fine brown hair drooped in a wave on
her forehead, and beneath it her violet eyes were deep and wistful.

"What a beautiful room!" she said in a quivering voice. "And the garden
is like one in an old English song."

"Yes, I hardly know which I love best--my garden or my shop."

The words were so far from Corinna's thoughts that they seemed to drift
to her from some distant point in space, out of the world beyond the
garden and the black brows