tituted for the
grey veil and habit she was discarding.

At first, as she made her way along the street, she found the continuous
ebb and flow of the crowded thoroughfare somewhat confusing after the
absolute calm and quiet of the preceding months, but very soon the
Londoner's familiar love of London and of its ceaseless, kaleidoscopic
movement returned to her, and with it the requisite poise to thread her
way through the throngs that trod the pavements.

Then her eyes turned to the shop windows--Catherine's stern discipline
had completely failed to stamp out the eternal feminine in her
niece--and as they absorbed the silken stuffs and rainbow colours that
gleamed and glowed behind the thick plateglass, she became suddenly
conscious of her own attire--of its cut and style. When last she had
worn it, it had been the final word in fashionable raiment. Now it was
out of date. The Wielitzska, whose clothes the newspapers had loved to
chronicle, in a frock in which any one of the "young ladies" behind the
counters of these self-same shops into which she was gazing would have
declined to appear! She almost laughed out loud. And then, quick on the
heels of her desire to laugh, came a revulsion of feeling. This little
incident, just the disparity between the fashion of her own clothes and
the fashion prevailing at the moment, served to make her realise, with
a curious clarity of vision, the irrevocable passage of time. A year--a
slice out of her life! What other differences would it ultimately show?

Something else was already making itself apparent--the fact that none
of the passers-by seemed to recognise her. In the old days, when she had
been dancing constantly at the Imperial Theatre, she had grown so used
to seeing the sudden look of interest and recognition spring into
the eyes of one or another, to the little eager gesture that nudged
a companion, pointing out the famous dancer as she passed along the
street, that she had thought nothing of it--had hardly consciously
noticed it. Now she missed it--missed it extraordinarily.

A sudden sense of intense loneliness swept over her--the loneliness
of the man who has been cast on a desert island, only returning to
his fellows after many weary months of absence. She felt she could not
endure to waste another moment before she saw again the beloved faces of
Gillian and Virginie and felt once more the threads of the old familiar
life quiver and vibrate between her fingers.

W