y for me--I am afraid that I want you
to be _sorry_; but don't be too sad. I am so much happier in
dying than I could have been in living; and in loving you I
have felt so much, I have lived so much--more perhaps than many
people in a whole lifetime.

See the gift you have given _me_, dearest one. Good-bye.
Good-bye.

ALLIDA.

It was over,--the last link with life, her last word spoken or
written,--and the echo of it seemed to come to her already as across a
great abyss that separated her from the world of the living.

With the signing of her name she had drawn the shroud over her face.

Only the mechanical things now remained to be done: dying was really
over; she really was dead.

She wrapped this last letter around all the others, kissed it, and
sealed it in a large envelope; then, putting on her hat and coat and
holding the letter in her ulster pocket, she left her room and went down
the stairs.

The house was a typically smart, flimsy London house, of the cheaper
Mayfair sort--a narrow box set on end and fitted with chintz and gilt
and white mouldings; a trap to Allida's imagination--an imagination that
no longer shrank from the contemplation of the facts of her life; for
they, too, were seen from across that abyss.

In the drawing-room, among shaded lamps, cushions, and swarming
bric-a-brac, her mother had flirted and allured--unsuccessfully--for how
many years? She had felt, since the time when, as a very little girl,
she had gone by the room every day coming in from her walk at tea-time
with her governess, and heard inside the high, smiling, artificial
voice, with its odd appealing quality, its vague, waiting pauses, the
shrinking from her mother and her mother's aims. Later on the aims had
been for her, too, and their determination had been partly, Allida felt,
hardened by the fact of a grown-up daughter being such a deterrent--so
in the way of a desperate, fading beauty who had never made the
brilliant match she hoped for. That she had never, either, made even a
moderate match for her, Allida, the girl felt, with a firmer closing of
her hand on the letter, she perhaps owed to _him_. What might her
weakness and her hatred of her home not have urged her into had not that
ideal--that seen and recognized ideal--armed her? The vision of old
Captain Defflin, his bruised-plum face and tight, pale eyes, rose before
her, and the vacuous, unwholesome countenance of young Sir