hile, I give these to our master. And my real widowhood
begins to-day."

And as she rose he looked at her across the colorful mound, and smiled,
half as with embarrassment. A lie, he thought, might ameliorate the
situation, and he bravely hazarded a prodigious one. "Is it necessary to
tell you that Jack loved you? And that the others never really counted?"

He rejoiced to see that Anne believed him. "No," she assented, "no, not
with him. Oddly enough, I am proud of that, even now. But--don't you
see?--I never loved him. I was just his priestess--the priestess of a
stucco god! Otherwise, I would know it wasn't his fault, but altogether
that of--the others."

He grimaced and gave a bantering flirt of his head. He said, with
quizzing eyes:

"Would it do any good to quote Lombroso, and Maudsley, and Gall, and
Krafft-Ebing, and Flechsig, and so on? and to tell you that the
excessive use of one brain faculty must necessarily cause a lack of
nutriment to all the other brain-cells? It would be rather up-to-date.
There is a deal I could tell you also as to what poisonous blood he
inherited; but to do this I have not the right." And then Rudolph
Musgrave said in all sincerity: "'A wild, impetuous whirlwind of passion
and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly _melody_ dwelling in
the heart of it.'"

She had put aside alike the drolling and the palliative suggestion, like
flimsy veils. "I think it wouldn't do any good whatever. When growing
things are broken by the whirlwind, they don't, as a rule, discuss the
theory of air-currents as a consolation. Men such as he was take what
they desire. It isn't fair--to us others. But it's true, for all that--"

Their eyes met warily; and for no reason which they shared in common
they smiled together.

"Poor little Lady of Shalott," said Rudolph Musgrave, "the mirror is
cracked from side to side, isn't it? I am sorry. For life is not so
easily disposed of. And there is only life to look at now, and life is a
bewilderingly complex business, you will find, because the laws of it
are so childishly simple--and implacable. And one of these laws seems to
be that in our little planet, might makes right--"

He stayed to puff his cigarette.

"Oh, Rudolph dear, don't--don't be just a merry-Andrew!" she cried
impulsively, before he had time to continue, which she perceived he
meant to do, as if it did not matter.

And he took her full meaning, quite as he had been used in the old time