she intends to live and
die with it. Her only refuge now is to go on faithfully loving it. So
there she is, buttoned into her black satin for ever!"

* * * * *

Until now Mrs. Conyers has remained faithful, and her consistency is
still made good to her; for none of her drawing-rooms has brought her
such appreciation. Chislebridge has never dared to emulate it; Mr.
Chambers and his friends have often painted it, and Mrs. Waterlow's
original, like a gay jest, uttered and then gone for ever, is no longer
in existence to vex and perplex her with its mocking smile. Moreover,
her own drawing-room no longer lacks its travesty of a soul. Owen
married Cicely Waterlow in the autumn, and Gwendolen, magnanimous, and
burning her bridges behind her, sent them for their wedding-present her
two lovely and unique red lacquer cabinets. One stands in the front, and
one in the back drawing-room in the little house in St. Leonard's
Terrace, and Cicely said to Owen on the day they arrived that any wrong
of the past, if wrong there had been, was now atoned for. And when they
married and went round the world for their wedding-trip, they found in
China a white pagoda, unflawed, larger, more sublimely elegant than the
old one. This they brought back to Gwendolen, and with unfaltering
courage she has placed it upon her mahogany centre table.

THE SUICIDE

A COMEDY

She took the bottle from its wrappings and looked at it--at its apparent
insignificance and the huge significance of the glaring word "Poison"
printed across it. She looked resolutely, and as resolutely went with it
to the other side of the room, and locked it away in the drawer of her
dressing-table. She paused here, and her eyes met her mirrored eyes. The
expression of her face arrested her attention. Did people who were going
to die usually look so calm, so placid? Really, it was a sort of
placidity that gazed back at her, so unlike the disfigured, tear-blinded
reflection that had been there that morning--when she had read the
paper. After the tempest of despair, the frozen decision, the nightmare
securing of the means of death (if any one should guess! stop her!) it
was indeed a sort of apathy that drenched her being, as if already the
drug had gone through it. The face in the mirror was very young and
very helpless and very charming. It was like the face of a little
wind-blown ghost, with its tossed-back hair and wide, empty, gazing
eye