rawing long panting
breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowly and aimlessly,
she began to saunter along a street of small private houses in damp
gardens that led to the Avenue du Bois. She sat down on a bench. Not far
off, the Arc de Triomphe raised its august bulk, and beyond it a
river of lights streamed down toward Paris, and the stir of the city's
heart-beats troubled the quiet in her bosom. But not for long. She
seemed to be looking at it all from the other side of the grave; and
as she got up and wandered down the Champs Elysees, half empty in the
evening lull between dusk and dinner, she felt as if the glittering
avenue were really changed into the Field of Shadows from which it takes
its name, and as if she were a ghost among ghosts.

Halfway home, a weakness of loneliness overcame her, and she seated
herself under the trees near the Rond Point. Lines of motors and
carriages were beginning to animate the converging thoroughfares,
streaming abreast, crossing, winding in and out of each other in a
tangle of hurried pleasure-seeking. She caught the light on jewels and
shirt-fronts and hard bored eyes emerging from dim billows of fur and
velvet. She seemed to hear what the couples were saying to each other,
she pictured the drawing-rooms, restaurants, dance-halls they were
hastening to, the breathless routine that was hurrying them along, as
Time, the old vacuum-cleaner, swept them away with the dust of their
carriage-wheels. And again the loneliness vanished in a sense of
release....

At the corner of the Place de la Concorde she stopped, recognizing a
man in evening dress who was hailing a taxi. Their eyes met, and Nelson
Vanderlyn came forward. He was the last person she cared to run across,
and she shrank back involuntarily. What did he know, what had he
guessed, of her complicity in his wife's affairs? No doubt Ellie had
blabbed it all out by this time; she was just as likely to confide her
love-affairs to Nelson as to anyone else, now that the Bockheimer prize
was landed.

"Well--well--well--so I've caught you at it! Glad to see you, Susy,
my dear." She found her hand cordially clasped in Vanderlyn's, and
his round pink face bent on her with all its old urbanity. Did nothing
matter, then, in this world she was fleeing from, did no one love or
hate or remember?

"No idea you were in Paris--just got here myself," Vanderlyn continued,
visibly delighted at the meeting. "Look here, don't suppose