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OUTSIDE, IN THE autumn rain, the leaves were falling.

For twenty years, every autumn since her marriage, Margaret Fleming had watched the leaves from this window; and always it had seemed to her that they were a part of her life which she held precious. As they fell she had known that they carried away something she could never recover — youth, beauty, pleasure, or only memories that she wanted to keep. Something gracious, desirable and fleeting; but never until this afternoon had she felt that the wind was sweeping away the illusion of happiness by which she lived. Beyond the panes, against which the rain was beating in gray sheets, she looked out on the naked outlines of the city: bleak houses, drenched grass in squares, and boughs of trees where a few brown or yellow leaves were clinging.

On the hearth rug the letter lay where it had fallen a few minutes — or was it a few hours ago? The flames from the wood fire cast a glow on the white pages; and she imagined that the ugly words leaped out to sting her like scorpions as she moved by them. Not for worlds, she told herself, would she stoop and touch them again. Yet what need had she to touch them when each slanting black line was etched in her memory with acid? Never, though she lived a hundred years, could she forget the way the letters fell on the white paper!

Once, twice, three times, she walked from window to door and back again from door to window. The wood fire burned cheerfully with a whispering sound. As the lights and shadows stirred over the familiar objects she had once loved, her gaze followed them hungrily. She had called this upstairs library George’s room, and she realized now that every piece of furniture, every book it contained, had been chosen to please him. He liked the golden brown of the walls, the warm colours in the Persian rugs, the soft depth of the cushioned chairs. He liked, too, the flamboyant red lilies beneath the little Chippendale mirror.

After twenty years of happiness, of comradeship, of mutual dependence, after all that marriage could mean to two equal spirits, was there nothing left except ashes? Could twenty years of happiness be destroyed in an afternoon, in an hour? Stopping abruptly, with a jerk which ran like a spasm through her slender figure, she gazed with hard searching eyes over the red lilies into the mirror. The grave beauty of her face, a beauty less of flesh than of spirit, floated there in the shadows like a flower in a pond.

“I am younger than he is by a year,” she thought, “and yet he can begin over again to love, while a new love for me would be desecration.”

There was the sound of his step on the stair. An instant later his hand fell on the door, and he entered the room.

Stooping swiftly, she picked up the letter from the rug and hid it in her bosom. Then turning toward him, she received his kiss with a smile. “I didn’t wait lunch for you,” she said.

“I got it at the club.” After kissing her cheek, he moved to the fire and stood warming his hands. “Beastly day. No chance of golf, so I’ve arranged to see that man from Washington. You won’t get out, I suppose?”

She shook her head. “No, I sha’n’t get out.”

Did he know, she wondered, that this woman had written to her? Did he suspect that the letter lay now in her bosom? He had brought the smell of rain, the taste of dampness, with him into the room; and this air of the outer world enveloped him while he stood there, genial, robust, superbly vital, clothed in his sanguine temperament as in the healthy red and white of his flesh. Still boyish at forty-five, he had that look of perennial innocence which some men carry untarnished through the most enlightening experiences. Even his moustache and his sharply jutting chin could not disguise the softness that hovered always about his mouth, where she noticed now, with her piercing scrutiny, the muscles were growing lax. Strange that she had never seen this until she discovered that George loved another woman! The thought dashed into her mind that she knew him in reality no better than if she had lived with a stranger for twenty years. Yet, until a few hours ago, she would have said, had any one asked her, that their marriage was as perfect as any mating between a man and a woman could be in this imperfect world.

“You’re wise. The wind’s still in the east, and there is no chance, I’m afraid, of a change.” He hesitated an instant, stared approvingly at the red lilies, and remarked abruptly, “Nice colour.”

“You always liked red.” Her mouth lost its softness. “And I was pale even as a girl.”

His genial gaze swept her face. “Oh, well, there’s red and red, you know. Some cheeks look best pale.”

Without replying to his words, she sat looking up at him while her thoughts, escaping her control, flew from the warm room out into the rough autumn weather. It was as if she felt the beating of the rain in her soul, as if she were torn from her security and whirled downward and onward in the violence of the storm. On the surface of her life nothing had changed. The fire still burned; the lights and shadows still flickered over the Persian rugs; her husband still stood there, looking down on her through the cloudless blue of his eyes. But the real Margaret, the vital part of her, was hidden far away in that deep place where the seeds of mysterious impulses and formless desires lie buried. She knew that there were secrets within herself which she had never acknowledged in her own thoughts; that there were unexpressed longings which had never taken shape even in her imagination. Somewhere beneath the civilization of the ages there was the skeleton of the savage.

The letter in her bosom scorched her as if it were fire. “That was why you used to call me magnolia blossom,” she said in a colourless voice, and knew it was only the superficial self that was speaking.

His face softened; yet so perfectly had the note of sentiment come to be understood rather than expressed in their lives that she could feel his embarrassment. The glow lingered in his eyes, but he answered only, “Yes, you were always like that.”

An irrepressible laugh broke from her. Oh, the irony, the bitterness! “Perhaps you like them pale!” she tossed back mockingly, and wondered if this Rose Morrison who had written to her was coloured like her name?

He looked puzzled but solicitous. “I’m afraid I must be off. If you are not tired, could you manage to go over these galleys this afternoon? I’d like to read the last chapter aloud to you after the corrections are made.” He had written a book on the history of law; and while he drew the roll of proof sheets from his pocket, she remembered, with a pang as sharp as the stab of a knife, all the work of last summer when they had gathered material together. He needed her for his work, she realized, if not for his pleasure. She stood, as she had always done, for the serious things of his life. This book could not have been written without her. Even his success in his profession had been the result of her efforts as well as his own.

“I’m never too tired for that,” she responded, and though she smiled up at him, it was a smile that hurt her with its irony.

“Well, my time’s up,” he said. “By the way. I’ll need my heavier golf things if it is fine to-morrow.” To-morrow was Sunday, and he played golf with a group of men at the Country Club every Sunday morning.

“They are in the cedar closet. I’ll get them out.”

“The medium ones, you know. That English tweed.”

“Yes, I know. I’ll have them ready,” Did Rose Morrison play golf, she wondered.

“I’ll try to get back early to dinner. There was a button loose on the waistcoat I wore last evening. I forgot to mention it this morning.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I left it to the servants, but I’ll look after it myself.” Again this perverse humour seized her. Had he ever asked Rose Morrison to sew on a button?

At the door he turned back. “And I forgot to ask you this morning to order flowers for Morton’s funeral. It is to be Monday.”

The expression on her face felt as stiff as a wax mask, and though she struggled to relax her muscles, they persisted in that smile of inane cheerfulness. “I’ll order them at once, before I begin the galleys,” she answered.

Rising from the couch on which she had thrown herself at his entrance, she began again her restless pacing from door to window. The library was quiet except for the whispering flames. Outside in the rain the leaves were falling thickly, driven hither and thither by the wind which rocked the dappled boughs of the sycamores. In the gloom of the room the red lilies blazed.

The terror, which had clutched her like a living thing, had its fangs in her heart. Terror of loss, of futility. Terror of the past because it tortured her. Terror of the future because it might be empty even of torture. “He is mine, and I will never give him up,” she thought wildly. “I will fight to the end for what is mine.”

There was a sound at the door and Winters, the butler, entered. “Mrs. Chambers, Madam. She was quite sure you would be at home.”

“Yes, I am at home.” She was always at home, even in illness, to Dorothy Chambers. Though they were so different in temperament, they had been friends from girlhood; and much of the gaiety of Margaret’s life had been supplied by Dorothy. Now, as her friend entered, she held out her arms. “You come whenever it rains, dear,” she said. “It is so good of you.” Yet her welcome was hollow, and at the very instant when she returned her friend’s kiss she was wishing that she could send her away. That was one of the worst things about suffering; it made one indifferent and insincere.

Dorothy drew off her gloves, unfastened her furs, and after raising her veil over the tip of her small inquisitive nose, held out her hand with a beseeching gesture.

“I’ve come straight from a committee luncheon. Give me a cigarette.”

Reaching for the Florentine box on the desk, Margaret handed it to her. A minute later, while the thin blue flame shot up between them, she asked herself if Dorothy could look into her face and not see the difference?

Small, plain, vivacious, with hair of ashen gold, thin intelligent features, and a smile of mocking brilliance, Dorothy was the kind of woman whom men admire without loving and women love without admiring. As a girl she had been a social success without possessing a single one of the qualities upon which social success is supposed to depend.

Sinking back in her chair, she blew several rings of smoke from her lips and watched them float slowly upward.

“We have decided to give a bridge party. There’s simply no other way to raise money. Will you take a table?”

Margaret nodded. “Of course.” Suffering outside of herself made no difference to her. Her throbbing wound was the only reality.

“Janet is going to lend us her house.” A new note had come into Dorothy’s voice. “I haven’t seen her since last spring. She had on a new hat, and was looking awfully well. You know Herbert has come back.”

Margaret started. At last her wandering attention was fixed on her visitor. “Herbert? And she let him?” There was deep disgust in her tone.

Dorothy paused to inhale placidly before she answered. “Well, what else could she do? He tried to make her get a divorce, and she wouldn’t.”

A flush stained Margaret’s delicate features. “I never understood why she didn’t. He made no secret of what he wanted. He showed her plainly that he loved the other woman.”

Dorothy’s only reply was a shrug; but after a moment, in which she smoked with a luxurious air, she commented briefly, “But man’s love isn’t one of the eternal verities.”

“Well, indifference is, and he proved that he was indifferent to Janet. Yet she has let him come back to her. I can’t see what she is to get out of it.”

Dorothy laughed cynically. “Oh, she enjoys immensely the attitude of forgiveness, and at last he has permitted her to forgive him. There is a spiritual vanity as well as a physical one, you know, and Janet’s weakness is spiritual.”

“But to live with a man who doesn’t love her? To remember every minute of the day and night that it is another woman he loves?”

“And every time that she remembers it she has the luxury of forgiving again.” Keenness flickered like a blade in Dorothy’s gray eyes. “You are very lovely, Margaret,” she said abruptly. “The years seem only to leave you rarer and finer, but you know nothing about life.”

A smile quivered and died on Margaret’s lips. “I might retort that you know nothing about love.”

With an impatient birdlike gesture Dorothy tossed her burned-out cigarette into the fire. “Whose love?” she inquired as she opened the Florentine box, “Herbert’s or yours?”

“It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

By the flame of the match she had struck Dorothy’s expression appeared almost malign. “There, my dear, is where you are wrong,” she replied. “When a man and a woman talk of love they speak two different languages. They can never understand each other because women love with their imagination and men with their senses. To you love is a thing in itself, a kind of abstract power like religion; to Herbert it is simply the way he feels.”

“But if he loves the other woman, he doesn’t love Janet; and yet he wants to return to her.” Leaning back in her chair, Dorothy surveyed her with a look which was at once sympathetic and mocking. Her gaze swept the pure grave features; the shining dusk of the hair; the narrow nose with its slight arch in the middle; the straight red lips with their resolute pressure; the skin so like a fading rose-leaf. Yes, there was beauty in Margaret’s face if one were only artist or saint enough to perceive it.

“There is so much more in marriage than either love or indifference,” she remarked casually. “There is, for instance, comfort.”

“Comfort?” repeated Margaret scornfully. She rose, in her clinging draperies of chiffon, to place a fresh log on the fire. “If he really loves the other woman, Janet ought to give him up,” she said.

At this Dorothy turned on her. “Would you, if it were George?” she demanded.

For an instant, while she stood there in front of the fire, it seemed to Margaret that the room whirled before her gaze like the changing colours in a kaleidoscope. Then a gray cloud fell over the brightness, and out of this cloud there emerged only the blaze of the red lilies. A pain struck her in the breast, and she remembered the letter she had hidden there.

“Yes,” she answered presently. “I should do it if it were George.”

A minute afterward she became conscious that while she spoke, a miracle occurred within her soul.

The tumult of sorrow, of anger, of bitterness, of despair, was drifting farther and farther away. Even the terror, which was worse than any tumult, had vanished. In that instant of renunciation she had reached some spiritual haven. What she had found, she understood presently, was the knowledge that there is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

“I should do it if it were George,” she said again, very slowly.

“Well, I think you would be very foolish.” Dorothy had risen and was lowering her veil. “For when George ceases to be desirable for sentimental reasons, he will still have his value as a good provider.” Her mocking laugh grated on Margaret’s ears. “Now, I must run away. I only looked in for an instant. I’ve a tea on hand, and I must go home and dress.”

When she had gone, Margaret stood for a minute, thinking deeply. For a minute only, but in that space of time her decision was made. Crossing to the desk, she telephoned for the flowers. Then she left the library and went into the cedar closet at the end of the hall. When she had found the golf clothes George wanted, she looked over them carefully and hung them in his dressing room. Her next task was to lay out his dinner clothes and to sew the loose button on the waistcoat he had worn last evening. She did these things deliberately, automatically, repeating as if it were a forumla, “I must forget nothing”; and when at last she had finished, she stood upright, with a sigh of relief, as if a burden had rolled from her shoulders. Now that she had attended to the details of existence, she would have time for the problem of living.

Slipping out of her gray dress, she changed into a walking suit of blue homespun. Then, searching among the shoes in her closet, she selected a pair of heavy boots she had worn in Maine last summer. As she put on a close little hat and tied a veil of blue chiffon over her face, she reflected, with bitter mirth, that only in novels could one hide one’s identity behind a veil.

In the hall downstairs she met Winters, who stared at her discreetly but disapprovingly.

“Shall I order the car, madam?”

She shook her head, reading his thoughts as plainly as if he had uttered them. “No, it has stopped raining. I want to walk.”

The door closed sharply on her life of happiness, and she passed out into the rain-soaked world where the mist caught her like damp smoke. So this was what it meant to be deserted, to be alone on the earth! The smell of rain, the smell that George had brought with him into the warm room upstairs, oppressed her as if it were the odour of melancholy.

As the chill pierced her coat, she drew her furs closely about her neck, and walked briskly in the direction of the street car. The address on the letter she carried was burned into her memory not in numbers, but in the thought that it was a villa George owned in an unfashionable suburb named Locust Park. Though she had never been there, she knew that, with the uncertain trolley service she must expect, it would take at least two hours to make the trip and return. Half an hour for Rose Morrison; and even then it would be night, and Winters at least would be anxious, before she reached home. Well, that was the best she could do.

The street car came, and she got in and found a seat behind a man who had been shooting and carried a string of partridges. All the other seats were filled with the usual afternoon crowd for the suburbs — women holding bundles or baskets and workmen returning from the factories. A sense of isolation like spiritual darkness descended upon her; and she closed her eyes and tried to bring back the serenity she had felt in the thought of relinquishment. But she could remember only a phrase of Dorothy’s which floated like a wisp of thistledown through her thoughts, “Spiritual vanity. With some women it is stronger than physical vanity.” Was that her weakness, vanity, not of the body, but of the spirit?

Thoughts blew in and out of her mind like dead leaves, now whirling, now drifting, now stirring faintly in her consciousness with a moaning sound. Twenty years. Nothing but that. Love and nothing else in her whole life…. The summer of their engagement. A rose garden in bloom. The way he looked. The smell of roses. Or was it only the smell of dead leaves rotting to earth?… All the long, long years of their marriage. Little things that one never forgot. The way he laughed. The way he smiled. The look of his hair when it was damp on his forehead. The smell of cigars in his clothes. The three lumps of sugar in his coffee. The sleepy look in his face when he stood ready to put out the lights while she went up the stairs. Oh, the little things that tore at one’s heart!

The street car stopped with a jerk, and she got out and walked through the drenched grass in the direction one of the women had pointed out to her.

“The Laurels? That low yellow house at the end of this lane, farther on where the piles of dead leaves are. You can’t see the house now, the lane turns, but it’s just a stone’s throw farther on.”

Thanking her, Margaret walked on steadily toward the turn in the lane. Outside of the city the wind blew stronger, and the coloured leaves, bronze, yellow, crimson, lay in a thick carpet over the muddy road. In the west a thin line of gold shone beneath a range of heavy, smoke-coloured clouds. From the trees rain still dripped slowly; and between the road and the line of gold in the west there stretched the desolate autumn landscape.

“Oh, the little things!” her heart cried in despair. “The little things that make happiness!”

Entering the sagging gate of The Laurels, she passed among mounds of sodden leaves which reminded her of graves, and followed the neglected walk between rows of leafless shrubs which must have looked gay in summer. The house was one of many cheap suburban villas (George had bought it, she remembered, at an auction) and she surmised that, until this newest tenant came, it must have stood long unoccupied. The whole place wore, she reflected as she rang the loosened bell, a furtive and insecure appearance.

After the third ring the door was hurriedly opened by a dishevelled maid, who replied that her mistress was not at home.

“Then I shall wait,” said Margaret firmly. “Tell your mistress, when she comes in, that Mrs. Fleming is waiting to see her.” With a step as resolute as her words, she entered the house and crossed the hall to the living room where a bright coal fire was burning.

The room was empty, but a canary in a gilded cage at the window broke into song as she entered. On a table stood a tray containing the remains of tea; and beside it there was a half-burned cigarette in a bronze Turkish bowl. A book — she saw instantly that it was a volume of the newest plays — lay face downward beneath a pair of eyeglasses, and a rug, which had fallen from the couch, was in a crumpled pile on the floor.

“So she isn’t out,” Margaret reflected; and turning at a sound, she confronted Rose Morrison.

For an instant it seemed to the older woman that beauty like a lamp blinded her eyes. Then, as the cloud passed, she realized that it was only a blaze, that it was the loveliness of dead leaves when they are burning.

“So you came?” said Rose Morrison, while she gazed at her with the clear and competent eyes of youth. Her voice, though it was low and clear, had no softness; it rang like a bell. Yes, she had youth, she had her flamboyant loveliness; but stronger than youth and loveliness, it seemed to Margaret, surveying her over the reserves and discriminations of the centuries, was the security of one who had never doubted her own judgment. Her power lay where power usually lies in an infallible self-esteem.

“I came to talk it over with you,” began Margaret quietly; and though she tried to make her voice insolent, the deep instinct of good manners was greater than her effort. “You tell me that my husband loves you.”

The glow, the flame, in Rose Morrison’s face made Margaret think again of leaves burning. There was no embarrassment, there was no evasion even, in the girl’s look. Candid and unashamed, she appeared to glory in this infatuation, which Margaret regarded as worse than sinful, since it was vulgar.

“Oh, I am so glad that you did,” Rose Morrison’s sincerity was disarming. “I hated to hurt you. You can never know what it cost me to write that letter; but I felt that I owed it to you to tell you the truth. I believe that we always owe people the truth.”

“And did George feel this way also?”

“George?” The flame mounted until it enveloped her. “Oh, he doesn’t know. I tried to spare him. He would rather do anything than hurt you, and I thought it would be so much better if we could talk it over and find a solution just between ourselves. I knew if you cared for George, you would feel as I do about sparing him.”

About sparing him! As if she had done anything for the last twenty years, Margaret reflected, except think out new and different ways of sparing George!

“I don’t know,” she answered, as she sat down in obedience to the other’s persuasive gesture. “I shall have to think a minute. You see this has been — well, rather — sudden.”

“I know, I know.” The girl looked as if she did. “May I give you a cup of tea? You must be chilled.”

“No, thank you. I am quite comfortable.”

“Not even a cigarette? Oh, I wonder what you Victorian women did for a solace when you weren’t allowed even a cigarette!”

You Victorian women! In spite of her tragic mood, a smile hovered on Margaret’s lips. So that was how this girl classified her. Yet Rose Morrison had fallen in love with a Victorian man.

“Then I may?” said the younger woman with her full-throated laugh. From her bright red hair, which was brushed straight back from her forehead, to her splendid figure, where her hips swung free like a boy’s, she was a picture of barbaric beauty. There was a glittering hardness about her, as if she had been washed in some indestructible glaze; but it was the glaze of youth, not of experience. She reminded Margaret of a gilded statue she had seen once in a museum; and the girl’s eyes, like the eyes of the statue, were gleaming, remote and impassive — eyes that had never looked on reality. The dress she wore was made of some strange “art cloth,” dyed in brilliant hues, fashioned like a kimono, and girdled at the hips with what Margaret mistook for a queer piece of rope. Nothing, not even her crude and confident youth, revealed Rose Morrison to her visitor so completely as this end of rope.

“You are an artist?” she asked, for she was sure of her ground. Only an artist, she decided, could be at once so arrogant with destiny and so ignorant of life.

“How did you know? Has George spoken of me?”

Margaret shook her head. “Oh, I knew without any one’s telling me.”

“I have a studio in Greenwich Village, but George and I met last summer at Ogunquit. I go there every summer to paint.”

“I didn’t know.” How easily, how possessively, this other woman spoke her husband’s name.

“It began at once.” To Margaret, with her inherited delicacy and reticence, there was something repellent in this barbaric simplicity of emotion.

“But you must have known that he was married,” she observed coldly.

“Yes, I knew, but I could see, of course, that you did not understand him.”

“And you think that you do?” If it were not tragic, how amusing it would be to think of her simple George as a problem!

“Oh, I realize that it appears very sudden to you; but in the emotions time counts for so little. Just living with a person for twenty years doesn’t enable one to understand him, do you think?”

“I suppose not. But do you really imagine,” she asked in what struck her as a singularly impersonal tone for so intimate a question, “that George is complex?”

The flame, which was revealed now as the illumination of some secret happiness, flooded Rose Morrison’s features. As she leaned forward, with clasped hands, Margaret noticed that the girl was careless about those feminine details by which George declared so often that he judged a woman. Her hair was carelessly arranged; her finger nails needed attention; and beneath the kimonolike garment, a frayed place showed at the back of her stocking. Even her red morocco slippers were run down at the heels; and it seemed to Margaret that this physical negligence had extended to the girl’s habit of thought.

“He is so big, so strong and silent, that it would take an artist to understand him,” answered Rose Morrison passionately. Was this really, Margaret wondered, the way George appeared to the romantic vision?

“Yes, he is not a great talker,” she admitted. “Perhaps if he talked more, you might find him less difficult.” Then before the other could reply, she inquired sharply, “Did George tell you that he was misunderstood?”

“How you misjudge him!” The girl had flown to his defense; and though Margaret had been, as she would have said “a devoted wife,” she felt that all this vehemence was wasted. After all, George, with his easy, prosaic temperament, was only made uncomfortable by vehemence. “He never speaks of you except in the most beautiful way,” Rose Morrison was insisting “He realizes perfectly what you have been to him, and he would rather suffer in silence all his life than make you unhappy.”

“Then what is all this about?” Though she felt that it was unfair, Margaret could not help putting the question.

Actually there were tears in Rose Morrison’s eyes. “I could not bear to see his life ruined,” she answered. “I hated to write to you; but how else could I make you realize that you were standing in the way of his happiness? If it were just myself, I could have borne it in silence. I would never have hurt you just for my own sake; but, the subterfuge, the dishonesty, is spoiling his life. He does not say so, but, oh, I see it every day because I love him!” As she bent over, the firelight caught her hair, and it blazed out triumphantly like the red lilies in Margaret’s library.

“What is it that you want me to do?” asked Margaret in her dispassionate voice.

“I felt that we owed you the truth,” responded the girl, “and I hoped that you would take what I wrote you in the right spirit.”

“You are sure that my husband loves you?”

“Shall I show you his letters?” The girl smiled as she answered, and her full red lips reminded Margaret suddenly of raw flesh. Was raw flesh, after all, what men wanted?

“No!” The single word was spoken indignantly.

“I thought perhaps they would make you see what it means,” explained Rose Morrison simply. “Oh, I wish I could do this without causing you pain!”

“Pain doesn’t matter. I can stand pain.”

“Well, I’m glad you aren’t resentful. After all, why should we be enemies? George’s happiness means more than anything else to us both.”

“And you are sure you know best what is for George’s happiness?”

“I know that subterfuge and lies and dishonesty cannot bring happiness.” Rose Morrison flung out her arms with a superb gesture. “Oh, I realize that it is a big thing, a great thing, I am asking of you. But in your place, if I stood in his way, I should so gladly sacrifice myself for his sake I should give him his freedom. I should acknowledge his right to happiness, to self-development.”

A bitter laugh broke from Margaret’s lips. What a jumble of sounds these catchwords of the new freedom made! What was this self-development which could develop only through the sacrifice of others? How would these immature theories survive the compromises and concessions and adjustments which made marriage permanent?

“I cannot feel that our marriage has interfered with his development,” she rejoined presently.

“You may be right,” Rose Morrison conceded the point. “But to-day he needs new inspiration, new opportunities. He needs the companionship of a modern mind.”

“Yes, he has kept young at my cost,” thought the older woman. “I have helped by a thousand little sacrifices, by a thousand little cares and worries, to preserve this unnatural youth which is destroying me. I have taken over the burden of details in order that he might be free for the larger interests of life. If he is young to-day, it is at the cost of my youth.”

For the second time that day, as she sat there in silence, with her eyes on the blooming face of Rose Morrison, a wave of peace, the peace of one who has been shipwrecked and then swept far off into some serene haven, enveloped her. Something to hold by, that at least she had found. The law of sacrifice, the ideal of self-surrender, which she had learned in the past. For twenty years she had given freely, abundantly, of her best; and to-day she could still prove to him that she was not beggared. She could still give the supreme gift of her happiness. “How he must love you!” she exclaimed. “How he must love you to have hurt me so much for your sake! Nothing but a great love could make him so cruel.”

“He does love me,” answered Rose Morrison, and her voice was like the song of a bird.

“He must.” Margaret’s eyes were burning, but no tears came. Her lips felt cracked with the effort she made to keep them from trembling. “I think if he had done this thing with any other motive than a great love, I should hate him until I died.” Then she rose and held out her hand. “I shall not stand in your way,” she added.

Joy flashed into the girl’s eyes. “You are very noble,” she answered. “I am sorry if I have hurt you. I am sorry, too, that I called you old-fashioned.”

Margaret laughed. “Oh, I am old-fashioned. I am so old-fashioned that I should have died rather than ruin the happiness of another woman.” The joy faded from Rose Morrison’s face. “It was not I,” she answered. “It was life. We cannot stand in the way of life.”

“Life to-day, God yesterday, what does it matter? It is a generation that has grasped everything except personal responsibility.” Oh, if one could only keep the humour! A thought struck her, and she asked abruptly, “When your turn comes, if it ever does, will you give way as I do?”

“That will be understood. We shall not hold each other back.”

“But you are young. You will tire first. Then he must give way?” Why, in twenty years George would be sixty-five and Rose Morrison still a young woman!

Calm, resolute, uncompromising. Rose Morrison held open the door. “Whatever happens, he would never wish to hold me back.”

Then Margaret passed out, the door closed behind her, and she stood breathing deep draughts of the chill, invigorating air. Well, that was over.

The lawn, with its grave-like mounds of leaves, looked as mournful as a cemetery. Beyond the bare shrubs the road glimmered; the wind still blew in gusts, now rising, now dying away with a plaintive sound; in the west the thread of gold had faded to a pale greenish light. Veiled in the monotonous fall of the leaves, it seemed to Margaret that the desolate evening awaited her.

“How he must love her,” she thought, not resentfully, but with tragic resignation. “How he must love her to have sacrificed me as he has done.”

This idea, she found as she walked on presently in the direction of the street car, had taken complete possession of her point of view. Through its crystal lucidity she was able to attain some sympathy with her husband’s suffering. What agony of mind he must have endured in these past months, these months when they had worked so quietly side by side on his book! What days of gnawing remorse! What nights of devastating anguish! How this newer love must have rent his heart asunder before he could stoop to the baseness of such a betrayal! Tears, which had not come for her own pain, stung her eyelids. She knew that he must have fought it hour by hour, day by day, night by night. Conventional as he was, how violent this emotion must have been to have conquered him so completely. “Terrible as an army with banners,” she repeated softly, while a pang of jealousy shot through her heart. Was there in George, she asked now, profounder depths of feeling than she had ever reached; was there some secret garden of romance where she had never entered? Was George larger, wilder, more adventurous in imagination, than she had dreamed? Had the perfect lover lain hidden in his nature, awaiting only the call of youth?

The street car returned almost empty; and she found restfulness in the monotonous jolting, as if it were swinging her into some world beyond space and time, where mental pain yielded to the sense of physical discomfort. After the agony of mind, the aching of body was strangely soothing.

Here and there, the lights of a house flashed among the trees, and she thought, with an impersonal interest, of the neglected villa, surrounded by mounds of rotting leaves, where that girl waited alone for happiness. Other standards. This was how the newer generation appeared to Margaret — other standards, other morals. Facing life stripped bare of every safeguard, of every restraining tradition, with only the courage of ignorance, of defiant inexperience, to protect one. That girl was not wilfully cruel. She was simply greedy for emotion; she was gasping at the pretense of happiness like all the rest of her undisciplined generation. She was caught by life because she had never learned to give up, to do without, to stand alone.

Her corner had come, and she stepped with a sensation of relief on the wet pavement. The rain was dripping steadily in a monotonous drizzle. While she walked the few blocks to her door, she forced herself by an effort of will to go on, step by step, not to drop down in the street and lose consciousness.

The tinkle of the bell and the sight of Winters’s face restored her to her senses.

“Shall I bring you tea, madam?”

“No, it is too late.”

Going upstairs to her bedroom, she took off her wet clothes and slipped into her prettiest tea gown, a trailing thing of blue satin and chiffon. While she ran the comb through her damp hair and touched her pale lips with colour, she reflected that even renunciation was easier when one looked desirable. “But it is like painting the cheeks of the dead,” she thought, as she turned away from the mirror and walked with a dragging step to the library. Never, she realized suddenly, had she loved George so much as in this hour when she had discovered him only to lose him.

As she entered, George hurried to meet her with an anxious air. “I didn’t hear you come in, Margaret. I have been very uneasy. Has anything happened?”

By artificial light he looked younger even than he had seemed in the afternoon; and this boyishness of aspect struck her as strangely pathetic. It was all a part, she told herself, of that fulfilment which had come too late, of that perilous second blooming, not of youth, but of Indian Summer. The longing to spare him, to save him from the suffering she had endured, pervaded her heart.

“Yes, something has happened,” she answered gently. “I have been to see Rose Morrison.”

As she spoke the name, she turned away from him, and walking with unsteady steps across the room, stood looking down into the fire. The knowledge of all that she must see when she turned, of the humiliation, the anguish, the remorse in his eyes, oppressed her heart with a passion of shame and pity. How could she turn and look on his wounded soul which she had stripped bare?

“Rose Morrison?” he repeated in an expressionless voice. “What do you know of Rose Morrison?”

At his question she turned quickly, and faced not anguish, not humiliation, but emptiness. There was nothing in his look except the blankness of complete surprise. For an instant the shock made her dizzy; and in the midst of the dizziness there flashed through her mind the memory of an evening in her childhood, when she had run bravely into a dark room where they told her an ogre was hiding, and had found that it was empty.

“She wrote to me.” Her legs gave way as she replied, and, sinking into the nearest chair, she sat gazing up at him with an immobile face.

A frown gathered his eyebrows, and a purplish flush (he flushed so easily of late) mounted slowly to the smooth line of his hair. She watched the quiver that ran through his under lip (strange that she had not noticed how it had thickened) while his teeth pressed it sharply. Everything about him was acutely vivid to her, as if she were looking at him closely for the first time. She saw the furrow between his eyebrows, the bloodshot stain on one eyeball, the folds of flesh beneath his jutting chin, the crease in his black tie, the place where his shirt gave a little because it had grown too tight — all these insignificant details would exist indelibly in her brain.

“She wrote to you?” His voice sounded strained and husky, and he coughed abruptly as if he were trying to hide his embarrassment. “What the devil! But you don’t know her.”

“I saw her this afternoon. She told me everything.”

“Everything?” Never had she imagined that he could appear so helpless, so lacking in the support of any conventional theory. A hysterical laugh broke from her, a laugh as utterly beyond her control as a spasm, and at the sound he flushed as if she had struck him. While she sat there she realized that she had no part or place in the scene before her. Never could she speak the words that she longed to utter. Never could she make him understand the real self behind the marionette at which he was looking. She longed with all her heart to say: “There were possibilities in me that you never suspected. I also am capable of a great love. In my heart I also am a creature of romance, of adventure. If you had only known it, you might have found in marriage all that you have sought elsewhere….” This was what she longed to cry out, but instead she said merely,

“She told me of your love. She asked me to give you up.”

“She asked you to give me up?” His mouth fell open as he finished, and while he stared at her he forgot to shut it. It occurred to her that he had lost the power of inventing a phrase, that he could only echo the ones she had spoken. How like a foolish boy he looked as he stood there, in front of the sinking fire, trying to hide behind that hollow echo!

“She said that I stood in your way.” The phrase sounded so grotesque as she uttered it that she found herself laughing again. She had not wished to speak these ugly things. Her heart was filled with noble words, with beautiful sentiments, but she could not make her lips pronounce them in spite of all the efforts she made. And she recalled suddenly the princess in the fairy tale who, when she opened her mouth, found that toads and lizards escaped from it instead of pearls and rubies.

At first he did not reply, and it seemed to her that only mechanical force could jerk his jaw back into place and close the eyelids over his vacant blue eyes. When at last he made a sound it was only the empty echo again, “stood in my way!”

“She is desperately in earnest.” Justice wrung this admission from her. “She feels that this subterfuge is unfair to us all. Your happiness, she thinks, is what we should consider first, and she is convinced that I should be sacrificed to your future. She was perfectly frank. She suppressed nothing.”

For the first time George Fleming uttered an original sound. “O Lord!” he exclaimed devoutly.

“I told her that I did not wish to stand in your way,” resumed Margaret, as if the exclamation had not interrupted the flow of her thoughts. “I told her I would give you up.”

Suddenly, without warning, he exploded. “What, in the name of heaven, has it got to do with you?” he demanded.

“To do with me?” It was her turn to echo. “But isn’t that girl—” she corrected herself painfully— “isn’t she living in your house at this minute?”

He cast about helplessly for an argument. When at last he discovered one, he advanced it with a sheepish air, as if he recognized its weakness. “Well, nobody else would take it, would they?”

“She says that you love her.”

He shifted his ground nervously. “I can’t help what she says, can I?”

“She offered to show me your letters.”

“Compliments, nothing more.”

“But you must love her, or you couldn’t — you wouldn’t—” A burning flush scorched Margaret’s body.

“I never said that I….” Even with her he had always treated the word love as if it were a dangerous explosive, and he avoided touching it now, “that I cared for her in that way.”

“Then you do in another way?”

He glanced about like a trapped animal. “I am not a fool, am I? Why, I am old enough to be her father! Besides, I am not the only one anyway. She was living with a man when I met her, and he wasn’t the first. She isn’t bad, you know. It’s a kind of philosophy with her. She calls it self….”

“I know.” Margaret cut the phrase short. “I have heard what she calls it.” So it was all wasted! Nothing that she could do could lift the situation above the level of the commonplace, the merely vulgar. She was defrauded not only of happiness, but even of the opportunity to be generous. Her sacrifice was as futile as that girl’s passion. “But she is in love with you now,” she said.

“I suppose she is.” His tone had grown stubborn. “But how long would it last? In six months she would be leaving me for somebody else. Of course, I won’t see her again,” he added, with the manner of one who is conceding a reasonable point. Then, after a pause in which she made no response, his stubbornness changed into resentment. “Anybody would think that you are angry because I am not in love with her!” he exclaimed. “Anybody would think — but I don’t understand women!”

“Then you will not — you do not mean to leave me?” she asked; and her manner was as impersonal, she was aware, as if Winters had just given her notice.

“Leave you?” He glanced appreciatively round the room. “Where on earth could I go?”

For an instant Margaret looked at him in silence. Then she insisted coldly, “To her, perhaps. She thinks that you are in love with her.”

“Well, I suppose I’ve been a fool,” he confessed, after a struggle, “but you are making too much of it.”

Yes, she was making too much of it; she realized this more poignantly than he would ever be able to do. She felt like an actress who has endowed a comic part with the gesture of high tragedy. It was not, she saw clearly now, that she had misunderstood George, but that she had overplayed life.

“We met last summer at Ogunquit.” She became aware presently that he was still making excuses and explanations about nothing. “You couldn’t go about much, you know, and we went swimming and played golf together. I liked her, and I could see that she liked me. When we came away I thought we’d break it off, but somehow we didn’t. I saw her several times in New York. Then she came here unexpectedly, and I offered her that old villa nobody would rent. You don’t understand such things, Margaret. It hadn’t any more to do with you than — than—” He hesitated, fished in the stagnant waters of his mind, and flung out abruptly, “than golf has. It was just a sort of — well, sort of — recreation.”

Recreation! The memory of Rose Morrison’s extravagant passion smote her sharply. How glorified the incident had appeared in the girl’s imagination, how cheap and tawdry it was in reality. A continual compromise with the second best, an inevitable surrender to the average, was this the history of all romantic emotion? For an instant, such is the perversity of fate, it seemed to the wife that she and this strange girl were united by some secret bond which George could not share — by the bond of woman’s immemorial disillusionment.

“I wouldn’t have had you hurt for worlds, Margaret,” said George, bending over her. The old gentle voice, the old possessive and complacent look in his sleepy blue eyes, recalled her wandering senses. “If I could only make you see that there wasn’t anything in it.”

She gazed up at him wearily. The excitement of discovery, the exaltation, the anguish, had ebbed away, leaving only gray emptiness. She had lost more than love, more than happiness, for she had lost her belief in life.

“If there had been anything in it, I might be able to understand,” she replied.

He surveyed her with gloomy severity. “Hang it all! You act as if you wanted me to be in love with her.” Then his face cleared as if by magic. “You’re tired out, Margaret and you’re nervous. There’s Winters now. You must try to eat a good dinner.”

Anxious, caressing, impatient to have the discussion end and dinner begin, he stooped and lifted her in his arms. For an instant she lay there without moving, and in that instant her gaze passed from his face to the red lilies and the uncurtained window beyond.

Outside the leaves were falling.