ak--and shut himself
away somewhere to forget and to do. Milly remembered certain unexplained
absences, which had mystified her at the time and aroused suspicions
that he "was having another affair." On his returns he had been morose
and dispirited. Evidently the mistress he had wooed in this intermittent
and casual fashion had not been kind. But the desire had never left
him,--the urge to paint, to create. And during these last desperate days
when, fevered, he was stumbling towards his end, he had seized the brush
and gone back to his real work....

At last she had reached the bottom of the pile--the Brittany sketches.
These she looked over as one might views of a past episode in life. The
memories of those foreign days rushed over her with a sad sort of joy.
There, they had been completely happy--at least she thought so
now--until that hateful woman had taken her husband from her. She had
almost forgotten the Russian baroness. Now with a start of fresh
interest she thought of the portrait and wondered where it was,--the
masterful picture of the one who had ruined her happiness. She looked
through the clutter again, thinking that it was probably with the
Russian wherever she was. But the portrait was there with the rest,
wrapped carefully in a piece of old silk.

With eager hands Milly undid the cover of the picture and dragged it
forward to the light. It was as if an old passion had burst from the
closet of the past. There she was, long, lean, cruel,--posed on her
haunches with upturned smiling face,--"The woman who would eat." She
lived there on the canvas, eternally young and strong. Milly could
admire the mastery of the painting even in the swell of her hatred for
the woman who had taken her lover-husband from her. He was young when he
had done that,--barely twenty-seven. A man who could paint like that at
twenty-seven ought to have gone far. Even Milly in the gloom of her
prejudiced soul felt something like awe for the power in him, which
seemingly justified the wrong he had done her. Even Milly perceived the
tragic laws stronger than herself, larger than her little world of
domestic moralities. And thus, gazing on her husband's masterpiece, she
realized that her hatred for the woman who she believed had done her the
greatest wrong one woman can do another was not real. It was not the
Baroness Saratoff who had cheated her: it was life itself! She no longer
felt eager to know whether they had been lovers,--as the