our told her definitely that she was in danger. She felt angry
with herself, even disgusted, as well as half frightened.

"What a brute I am!"

She formed those words with her lips. An acute sense of disappointment
pervaded her because Craven had not come, though she had no reason
whatever to expect him. But she was angry because of her feeling about
Seymour Portman. It was horrible to have such a tepid heart as hers was
when such a long and deep devotion was given to it. The accustomed thing
then made scarcely any impression upon her, while the thing that was
new, untried, perhaps worth very little, excited in her an expectation
which amounted almost to longing!

"How can Seymour go on loving such a woman as I am?" she thought.

Stretching herself a little she was able to look into an oval Venetian
mirror above the high marble frame of the fireplace. She looked to
scourge herself as punishment for what she was feeling.

"You miserable, ridiculous old woman!" she said to herself, as she saw
her lined face which the mirror, an antique one, slightly distorted.

"You ought to be thankful to have such a friendship as Seymour's!"

She said that, and she knew that if, disobeying her order to the
footman, he had come upstairs, her one desire would have been to get rid
of him, at all costs, to get him and his devotion out of the house, lest
Craven should come and she should not have Craven alone. If Seymour knew
that surely even his love would turn into hatred!

And if Craven knew!

She felt that day as if all the rampart of will, which ten years' labour
had built up between her and the dangers and miseries attendant upon
such a temperament as hers, were beginning before her eyes to crumble
into dust, touched by the wand of a maleficent enchanter.

And it was Craven's fault. He should have been like other young men,
obedient to the call of beauty and youth; he should have been wax in
Beryl Van Tuyn's pretty hands. Then this would never have happened, this
crumbling of will. He had done a cruel thing without being aware of his
cruelty. He had been carried away by something that was not primarily
physical. And in yielding to that uncommon impulse, which proved that
he was not typical, he had set in activity, in this hidden and violent
activity, that which had been sleeping so deeply as to seem like
something dead.

As Lady Sellingworth looked into the Venetian mirror, which made her
ugliness of age look uglier than it