feeling, there was a shock in the
discovery that the perfect balance, the equilibrium of his temperament,
had been overthrown. Certainly in their serene and sentimental
association she had stumbled on no hidden fires, no reddening embers of
that earlier passion. Yet she understood that even in her girlhood, even
in the April freshness of her beauty, she had never touched the depths
of his nature. It was Alice Rokeby--frightened, shallow, desperate,
deserted, whom he had loved.

"What do you want?" she asked quietly. "What do you wish me to do?"

"Oh, I don't know!" replied Alice. "I don't know. I haven't thought--but
there ought to be something. There ought to be something more permanent
than love for one to live by."

In her anguish she had wrung a profound truth from experience; and as
soon as she had uttered it, she lifted her pale face and stared with
that mournful interrogation into the twilight. Something permanent to
live by! In the mute desperation of her look she appeared to be
searching the garden, the world, and the immense darkness of the sky,
for an answer. The afterglow had faded slowly into the blue dusk of
night; only a faint thread of gold still lingered beyond the cedars on
the western horizon. Something permanent and indestructible! Was this
what humanity had struggled for--had lived and fought and died
for--since man first came up out of the primeval jungle? Where could one
find unalterable peace if it were not high above the ebb and flow of
desire? She herself might break away from codes and customs; but she
could not break away from the strain of honour, of simple rectitude,
which was in her blood and had made her what she was.

"Yes, there ought to be something. There is something," she said slowly.
Though her hand still clasped Alice Rokeby's, she was gazing beyond her
across the terrace into the garden. She thought of many things while she
sat there, with that look of clairvoyance, of radiant vision, in her
eyes. Of Alice Rokeby as a little girl in a white dress, with a blue
hair ribbon that would never stay tied; of John Benham when she had
played ball with him in her childhood; of Kent Page and that young love,
so poignant while it lasted, so utterly dead when it was over; of her
long, long search for perfection, for something that would not pass
away; of the brief pleasures and the vain expectations of life; of the
gray deserted road filled with dead leaves and the sound of voices far
off