and black figures
moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks.
Glennard noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly
dressed; and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as
though the bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative
rain. He rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery.
Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he
asked for some flowers.

"Anything in the emblematic line?" asked the anaemic man behind the
dripping counter.

Glennard shook his head.

"Just cut flowers? This way, then." The florist unlocked a glass door
and led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the
scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were
white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the
long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an
odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned
in the doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of
Margaret Aubyn's nearness--not the imponderable presence of his inner
vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms....

The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back
and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals
shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the
illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.

XII

The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a
final effort of escape from his wife's inexpressive acceptance of his
shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to
that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His
chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife's
indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his
dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to
her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to
her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes
seemed, understood without knowing.

In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a
desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings,
in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been.
There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the
wrong he had done her seemed a