d at her. "How beautiful you are with that white round your face,"
he said. "You are like a woman of snow."

She looked back at him as though, from the unhesitating steadiness of
her gaze, to lend him some of her own clearness.

"Don't you see that it's not real? Don't you see that it's because you
suddenly find me beautiful, and because, as a woman of snow, I allure
you, that you think you love me? Do you really deceive yourself?"

He stared at her; but the ray only illumined the bewilderment of his
dispossession. "I don't pretend to be an idealist," he said, stopping
still before her; "I don't pretend that it's not because I suddenly find
you beautiful; that's one reason; and a very essential one, I think; but
there are other reasons, lots of them. Amabel--you must see that my love
for you is an entirely different sort of thing from what my love for her
ever was."

She said nothing. She could not argue with him, nor ask, as if for a
cheap triumph, if it were different from his love for the later
mistress. She saw, indeed, that it was different now, whatever it had
been yesterday. Clearly she saw, glancing at herself as at an object in
the drama, that she offered quite other interests and charms, that her
attractions, indeed, might be of a quality to elicit quite new
sentiments from Sir Hugh, sentiments less shadowing than those of
yesterday had been. And so she accepted his interpretation in silence,
unmoved by it though doing it full justice, and for a little while Sir
Hugh said nothing either. He still stood before her and she no longer
looked at him, but down at her folded hands that did not tremble at all
tonight, and she wondered if now, perhaps, he would understand her
silence and leave her. But when, in an altered voice, he said: "Amabel;"
she looked at him.

She seemed to see everything tonight as a disembodied spirit might see
it, aware of what the impeding flesh could only dimly manifest; and she
saw now that her husband's face had never been so near beauty.

It did not attain it; it was, rather, as if the shadow, lifting entirely
for a flickering moment, revealed something unconscious, something
almost innocent, almost pitiful: it was as if, liberated, he saw beauty
for a moment and put out his hands to it, like a child putting out its
hands to touch the moon, believing that it was as near to him, and as
easily to be attained, as pleasure always had been.

"Try to forgive me," he said, and his voice