young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that
Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not
unwilling his departure should have left. But in the dissolution of
sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to
withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned
that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably
staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to cut. He had
no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have preferred to sow
a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his unconsidered
inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn's
business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed
to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they
might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
affections.

It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his
bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the small
change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the
luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had
the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.

Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote
him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had died, she had
no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York
to her expanding personality. She was already famous and her laurels
were yet unharvested.

For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power before she
made the final effort of escape. They had not met for over a year, but
of course he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to
New York the day before her departure, and they spent its last hours
together. Glennard had planned no course of action--he simply meant to
let himself drift. They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid
current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push
his way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she
reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose
to leave, and stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his
heart. He was tired of her already--he was always tired of her--yet he
was not sure that he wanted her to go.

"I may never see you again," he said, as though confidently appeal