house by the western garden door.

The evening was a blank to Theodora. She dressed in her satins and
laces, and let her maid fasten her wonderful emeralds on throat and
breast and hair. She descended to the drawing-room and walked in to
dinner with some strange man--all as one in a dream. She answered as an
automaton, and the man thought how beautiful she was, and what a pity
for so beautiful a woman to be so stupid and silent and dull.

"Almost wanting," was his last comment to himself as the ladies left the
dining-room.

Then Theodora forced herself to speak--to chatter to a now complacent
group of women who gathered round her. Those emeralds, and the way the
diamonds were set round them, proved too strong an attraction for even
Lady Harrowfield to keep far away.

She was going to have her rubies remounted, and this seemed just the
pattern she would like.

So the time passed, and the men came into the room. But Hector was not
with them. He had found a telegram, it transpired, which had been
waiting for him on his return, and it would oblige him to go to
Bracondale immediately, so he was motoring up to London that night. He
had acted his part to the end, and no one guessed he was leaving the
best of his life behind him. When Theodora realized he was gone she
suddenly felt very faint; but she, too, was not of common clay, and
breeding will tell in crises of this sort, so she sat up and talked
gayly. The evening passed, and at last she was alone for the night.

There are moralists who will assure us the knowledge of having done
right brings its own consolation. And in good books, about good women,
the heroine experiences a sense of peace and satisfaction after having
resigned the forbidden joy of her life. But Theodora was only a human
being, so she spent the night in wild, passionate regret.

She had done right with no stern sense of the word "Right" written up in
front of her, but because she was so true and so sweet that she must
keep her word and not betray Josiah. She did not analyze anything. Life
was over for her, whatever came now could only find her numb. By an
early train Josiah left for London.

"Take care of yourself, my love," he had said, as he looked in at her
door, "and write to me this afternoon as to what train you decide to
leave by on Thursday."

She promised she would, and he departed, thoroughly satisfied with his
visit among the great world.

The day was spent as the other days, and af