mptiness. Her heart when it cried out to
him produced the queer, creepy effect of a man talking to himself--there
was no one to hear or to answer. There was a needle but no pole; there
was a law of gravitation, but nothing to justify the power of
attraction.

She was dazed, lost, which was the reason why in the following autumn
she went abroad. She didn't know what else to do. Aunt Emily was rich
and kind; but there were limits to hospitality. One had to feel that
there was a world beneath one's feet, and Europe seemed to be there for
that purpose. Besides, it was easy to travel while the children were so
young. The lawyer conveyed to Chip her intention of taking them, and
returned with the father's consent. She was not bound to ask for this,
but she considered it courteous to do so. If while she did it he chose
to take the opportunity to recognize her continued existence by an
inquiry or a word--well, then, she said to herself with a sob, it was
there for him to make use of. But he didn't take it. He maintained the
silence on which he had fallen back ever since her final peremptory
letter requesting him not to write to her--she wondered if she had made
it more peremptory than she had intended!--and so she sailed away
without so much as a gift from him to the children. She could hardly
bear to look at the shore of the continent that held him as it faded out
of sight, so bitterly she resented what she now called his callousness.

When the cold weather came she established herself at Cap d'Ail, where
the lofty perch of the hotel above Monaco and the Mediterranean seemed
to lift her into a region of friendly, flowery peace. She enjoyed this
as much as she could enjoy anything. No echo of the past reached her
here, and it was an unexpected relief to be away from Aunt Emily's
bursts of triumph and felicitation. With a book she hardly looked at in
her hand she could sit at her window or on the terrace, soothed
incomprehensibly by the blue-green sweep of the immemorial sea beside
which so many other sad hearts had watched before her own. She felt
herself caught into a fellowship that included not only Hagar and
Hecuba, but myriads of unremembered women whose tears alone might have
filled this vast inland ocean--drawing a comfort that was not wholly
morbid from the reflection that there was an end even to the breaking of
hearts.

Here in this high, sequestered spot, which nevertheless preserved the
_mondanites_ to which she