or wringing her hands, barely eating and sleeping. She recalled that
she had even beaten the walls and flung herself against them.

The procession was startlingly familiar and fresh of lineament; even the
moments of rapture, whose memory is soonest to fade, and the fitful
solace she had found, in those last days, imagining what might have
been.

She got up and walked about the room, half amused, half appalled. "What
does it mean?" she thought. "Is it that there is an impalpable entity in
this world for me, and that part of it is in one man and part in
another? Is the man who has the larger share the one I really love? Is
that the explanation of loving a second time? It certainly is very
like--ridiculously like."

She turned her thoughts to Hedworth, but they swung aside and pointed
straight to the other man. She half expected to see his ghost framed in
the dark window, he seemed so close. She found herself living the past
again and again, instinct with its sensations. He had had much in his
life to cark and harrow, and the old sympathy and tenderness vibrated
aloud, and little out of tune. She wondered what had become of him, what
he was doing at the moment. She did not believe that he had loved any
woman since; he had nearly exhausted his capacity for loving when he met
her.

And at the same time she was distinctly conscious that if the two men
stood before her she should spring to Hedworth. Nevertheless, when she
conjured his image, the shadowy figure of the other man stood behind,
looking over Hedworth's shoulder, with the half-cynical smile which had
only left his mouth when he had told her, with white face whose muscles
were free of his will for the moment, that he loved her.

"Is it the old love that is demanding its rights, not the man?" she
thought. "Is it true, then, that all we women want is love, and that it
is as welcome in one attractive frame as another? That it is not
Hedworth I love, but what he gives me? Now that I even suspect this, can
I be happy? Will that ghost always look over his shoulder?"

She was a woman of sound practical sense, and had no intention of
risking her happiness by falling a victim to her imagination. She
pressed the electric-button and wrote a letter to her former lover--a
friendly letter, without sentimental allusion, asking for news of him.
The sight of the handwriting that once had thrilled her, as well as the
nature of his reply, would at least bring her to some sort of