lone, to be quiet, to stare her situation in
the face, and collect herself before she came out again among her kind.
She had stood on the door-step, cowering among her bags, counting the
instants till a step sounded and the door-knob turned, letting her in
from the searching glare of the outer world.... And now she had sat for
an hour in Violet's drawing-room, in the very house where her honey-moon
might have been spent; and no one had asked her where she had come from,
or why she was alone, or what was the key to the tragedy written on her
shrinking face....

That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody
wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember. The old risk of
prying curiosity, of malicious gossip, was virtually over: one was left
with one's drama, one's disaster, on one's hands, because there was
nobody to stop and notice the little shrouded object one was carrying.
As Susy watched the two people before her, each so frankly unaffected
by her presence, Violet Melrose so engrossed in her feverish pursuit of
notoriety, Fulmer so plunged in the golden sea of his success, she felt
like a ghost making inaudible and imperceptible appeals to the grosser
senses of the living.

"If I wanted to be alone," she thought, "I'm alone enough, in all
conscience." There was a deathly chill in such security. She turned to
Fulmer.

"And Grace?"

He beamed back without sign of embarrassment. "Oh, she's here,
naturally--we're in Paris, kids and all. In a pension, where we can
polish up the lingo. But I hardly ever lay eyes on her, because she's
as deep in music as I am in paint; it was as big a chance for her as for
me, you see, and she's making the most of it, fiddling and listening to
the fiddlers. Well, it's a considerable change from New Hampshire." He
looked at her dreamily, as if making an intense effort to detach himself
from his dream, and situate her in the fading past. "Remember the
bungalow? And Nick--ah, how's Nick?" he brought out triumphantly.

"Oh, yes--darling Nick?" Mrs. Melrose chimed in; and Susy, her head
erect, her cheeks aflame, declared with resonance: "Most awfully
well--splendidly!"

"He's not here, though?" from Fulmer.

"No. He's off travelling--cruising."

Mrs. Melrose's attention was faintly roused. "With anybody interesting?"

"No; you wouldn't know them. People we met...." She did not have to
continue, for her hostess's gaze had again strayed.

"And you've co