ard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He
always skipped the "literary notices" in the papers and he had small
leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had
therefore no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the "Aubyn
Letters" had awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book
ceased to be talked about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this
apparent subsidence of the agitation about it brought the reassuring
sense that he had exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did
not ease his conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of
obscurity: he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and
thrust into the soothing darkness of a cell.

But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to
turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to
which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first
page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the
photograph that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of
memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this
unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been
in life. Was it because he understood her better? He looked long into
her eyes; little personal traits reached out to him like caresses--the
tired droop of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke,
the movements of her long expressive hands. All that was feminine
in her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her
unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had developed
in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in even this poor
semblance of herself. For a moment he found consolation in the thought
that, at any cost, they had thus been brought together; then a flood of
shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare
to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a
renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused
from the creeping lethargy of death....

He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of
mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal
of their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her
again; and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of
losing the sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her
pres