ears did come, swiftly, like the ripple of the rain. On the
table where she sat she put her head down and sobbed, paroxysmally, as
sobs a child.

THE GENERAL SESSIONS

CHAPTER I

DISENCHANTMENT

"_Il segreto_----"

Marie's voice rang out, clear and fluid, scattering notes through the
room, filling it with them, charging the air with melody, then, like a
chorus entering a crypt, it sank in diminishing accords and, sinking,
died slowly away.

The _segreto_ indeed! The secret of happiness was remoter now than
when, under the teaching of the ex-first lady, she had first attacked
the score. But her voice had improved. It was fuller, more resonant
and ample.

Marie, too, had improved. In face and figure beauty had developed. Her
manner was securer, her eyes more grave, her smile less frequent. The
bud had blossomed.

In the process a year had gone. From high Norman downs she had watched
the summer pass. Autumn had met her in the Elysian Fields. There the
wolfish winter had approached. At the first bite there had been a
flight to Havre, the return to New York. Now it was spring again.
Through the open windows of the Arundel came the city's hum and with
it the subtleties and enticements of May.

A year had gone. But there are years that count double. There are
others so vast that in them you may have evolved a world, seen it glow
and subside. The solitudes of space appal. The solitudes of the heart
may be as endless as they. In those where Marie loitered a world had
had its birth and subsidence, a world with gem-like hopes for stars, a
world lighted by a sun so eager that its rays had made her blind.
There had been aspirations, gorgeous and tangental as comets are.
There had been the colorless ether of which dreams are made. For
cosmic matter there was love. A year had gone. In it, these wonders
had formed and fled.

Marie got from the piano. It had no secret to tell. But there was
another which the year had revealed, a secret which, at first opaque
and obscure, little by little had taken shape and changed from an
impossibility into a monstrous fact. Marie had begun by disavowing it.
She had disowned it, would have none of it. But disavowals cease. In
certain conditions we get used to monsters. The soul makes itself at
home with what it must. The monster to which Marie was accustoming
herself was the knowledge that her lover had lied.

In departing with him from the den of the ex-first lady it was not
m