erfect blond fairy. Have
you not a kiss for me, my dear?"

Cecil is amiable as an angel, won by the mellow, persuasive voice.

Violet excuses herself as soon as possible. She has a headache and does
look deathly pale. Eugene makes himself supremely entertaining, to the
great delight of his mother. It is so new a phase for him to do
anything with direct reference to another person's happiness or
well-being, that he feels comfortably virtuous and heroic. No one shall
make Violet suffer for his sake. What an awful blunder it was _not_ to
marry her, for, after all, Floyd is not really in love with her!

Violet cannot sleep. A strange impulse haunts her, a desire to escape
from the chain, to fly to the bounds of the earth, to bury herself out
of sight, to give up, worsted and discomfited, for there can be no
fight. There is no enemy to attack. It is kindest, tenderest friend who
has offered her a stone for bread, when she did not know the
difference. She recalls her old talks with Denise concerning a wife's
duty and obedience and respect. Ah, how could she have been so
ignorant, or having been blind, why should she see now? That old life
was satisfactory! She never dreamed of anything beyond. But she has
seen the fine gold of love offered upon the altar. John Latimer is no
better, finer, or nobler man than Floyd Grandon, and yet he loves his
wife with so tender a passion that Violet's life looks like prison and
starvation beside it. If she dared go to Floyd Grandon and ask for a
little love! Did he give it all to that regal woman long ago, and does
the ghost of the strangled passion stand between?

She tosses wearily, and is not much refreshed when morning dawns.
Fortunately it is a busy day. Mrs. Dayre, who is a rather youngish
widow of ample means, and who spent her early days at Westbrook, a sort
of elder contemporary of the Grandons and Miss Stanwood, is to come
with her young and pretty daughter, and take her mother with them to
the West. Eugene goes to the station, and finds Miss Bertie Dayre a
very stylish young woman, with an abundance of blond hair, creamy skin,
white teeth, and a dazzling smile. She has been a year in society, the
kind that has made an old campaigner of her already. She is not exactly
fast, but she dallies on the seductive verge and picks out the
daintiest bits of slang. She is seventeen, but looks mature as twenty;
her mother is thirty-six, and could discount the six years easily.

Violet has