e of roses; the perfume hung heavy-sweet, poignant;
there was apparently no sky, no earth, only a close, purple envelopment,
imminent, palpable, lying languidly, unstirring, in a space without form
or limit and of one color.

Lettice walked silently by his side; he could hear her breathing,
irregular, quick. She was very close to him, then moved suddenly,
consciously, away; but, almost immediately, she drifted back, brushing his
shoulder; it seemed that she returned inevitably, blindly; in the gloom
her gown fluttered like the soft, white wings of a moth against him.

"It's worse," he repeated, his voice loud and harsh, like a discordant
bell clashing in the sostenuto passage of a symphony; "but it's all one
to me--there's nothing else they can take; I'm free, free to sleep or
wake, to be drunk when I like with no responsibility to Simmons or any one
else--"

Her breathing increasingly grew labored, oppressed; a little sob escaped,
softly miserable. She was crying. He was completely callous, indifferent.
They stood before the dark, porchless facade of her home.

"I thought life was so happy," she articulated, facing him; "but now it
hurts me ... here;" he saw her press her hand against the swelling, tender
line of her breast. His theatrical self-consciousness bowed him over the
other hand, pressing upon it a half-calculated kiss. She stood motionless;
he felt rather than saw the intensity of her gaze. "I wish I could mend
the hurt," he began, appropriately, professionally.

He was interrupted by a figure emerging from the obscurity of the house.
Pompey Hollidew peered at them from the low, stone lintel. "Letty," he
pronounced, in a voice at once whining and truculent; "who?--oh! that
Makimmon.... Letty, come in the house." He caught her arm and dragged her
incontinently toward the door. "... rascal," Gordon heard him mutter,
"spendthrift. If you ever walk again with Gordon Makimmon," the old man,
through his daughter, addressed the other, "don't walk back here, don't
come home. Not a dollar of mine shall fall through the pockets of that
shiftless breed."

XX

Clare's funeral deducted a further sum from the amount Gordon had received
for the sale of his home, but he had left still nine hundred and odd
dollars. He revolved in his mind the disposition of this sum, once more
sitting with chair tilted back against the dingy wooden home of the
_Greenstream Bugle_; he rehearsed its possibilities for frugality, f