from one step to
another, she remembered how she had sprung up the same steep flight
after that visit of Guy Dawnish's when she had looked in the glass and
seen on her face the blush of youth.

When she reached her room she bolted the door as she had done that day,
and again looked at herself in the narrow mirror above her
dressing-table. It was just a year since then--the elms were budding
again, the willows hanging their green veil above the bench by the
river. But there was no trace of youth left in her face--she saw it now
as others had doubtless always seen it. If it seemed as it did to Lady
Caroline Duckett, what look must it have worn to the fresh gaze of
young Guy Dawnish?

A pretext--she had been a pretext. He had used her name to screen some
one else--or perhaps merely to escape from a situation of which he was
weary. She did not care to conjecture what his motive had
been--everything connected with him had grown so remote and alien. She
felt no anger--only an unspeakable sadness, a sadness which she knew
would never be appeased.

She looked at herself long and steadily; she wished to clear her eyes
of all illusions. Then she turned away and took her usual seat beside
her work-table. From where she sat she could look down the empty
elm-shaded street, up which, at this hour every day, she was sure to
see her husband's figure advancing. She would see it presently--she
would see it for many years to come. She had a sudden aching sense of
the length of the years that stretched before her. Strange that one who
was not young should still, in all likelihood, have so long to live!

Nothing was changed in the setting of her life, perhaps nothing would
ever change in it. She would certainly live and die in Wentworth. And
meanwhile the days would go on as usual, bringing the usual
obligations. As the word flitted through her brain she remembered that
she had still to put the finishing touches to the paper she was to read
the next afternoon at the meeting of the Higher Thought Club.

The book she had been reading lay face downward beside her, where she
had left it an hour ago. She took it up, and slowly and painfully, like
a child laboriously spelling out the syllables, she went on with the
rest of the sentence:

--"and they spring from a level not much above that of the springing of
the transverse and diagonal ribs, which are so arranged as to give a
convex curve to the surface of the vaulting conoid."

T