ond time. She might have been a person with a sorrow--a love-sorrow.
At that thought Edith's heart went out to her in sympathy. She herself
was so happy, with a happiness that had grown more intense each month,
each week, each day, of her six years of married life, that it filled
her imagination with a blissful, pitying pain to think that other women
suffered.

The pity was sincere, and the bliss came from the knowledge of her
security. She felt it wonderful to have such a sense of safety as that
she experienced in gazing across the street at the girl's wistful face.
It was like the overpowering thankfulness with which a man on a rock
looks on while others drown. It wasn't callousness; it was only an
appreciation of mercies. She was genuinely sorry for the girl, if the
girl needed sorrow; but she didn't see what she could do to help her.
It was well known that out in that life of New York--and of the world at
large--there were tempests of passion in which lives were wrecked; but
from them she herself was as surely protected by her husband's love as,
in her warm and well-stored house, she was shielded from hunger and the
storm. She accepted this good fortune meekly and as a special
blessedness; but she couldn't help rejoicing all the more in the
knowledge of her security.

The knowledge of her security gave luxury to the sigh with which she
turned in the course of a few minutes to write her note. The desk stood
under the mirror between the two windows at the end of the small back
drawing-room. The small back drawing-room projected as an ell from the
larger one that crossed the front of the house. She had just reached the
words, "shall have great pleasure in accepting your kind invitation
to--" when she heard her husband's step on the stairs. He was coming up
from his solitary breakfast. She could hear, too, the rustle of the
newspaper in his hand as he ascended, softly and tunelessly whistling.
The sound of that whistling, which generally accompanied his presence
in the house, was more entrancing to her than the trill of nightingales.

The loneliness her fancy ascribed to the girl over by the Park
emphasized her sense of possession. She raised her head and looked into
the mirror. The miracle of it struck her afresh, that the great, strong
man she saw entering the room, with his brown velvet house-jacket and
broad shoulders and splendid head, should be hers. She herself was a
little woman, of soft curves and dimpling sm