through the back-thrust folds of the white
silk automobile veil swathing the small head, and the nervous,
bird-like movement of the head itself.

He did not move; there was no involuntary, galvanic reaction; no sudden
gasp and flame of wonder. He simply held his cigarette still poised in
his fingers, half-way to his lips, with the minutest relaxing of the
smile that still hovered about them, while a dull and ashen grayness
crept into his face, second by waiting second.

It was not until his eyes met hers that he took three wavering and
undecided steps toward her.

With a silent movement--more of warning than of fright, he afterward
told himself--she pressed her gloved fingers to her lips. What her
intent eyes meant to say to him, in that wordless, telepathic message,
Durkin could not guess; all thought was beyond him. But in a moment or
two the roadway cleared, the car shook and plunged forward, the
floating curtains fluttered and trailed behind.

Durkin turned blindly, and pushed and ran and dodged through the
languidly amazed promenaders, following after that sudden and
bewildering vision, as after his last hope in life. But the fine,
white, limestone Riviera dust from the fading car's tire-heels, and the
burnt gases from its engines, were all the road held for him, as it
undulated off into hillside quietnesses.

He heard the young Chicagoan calling after him, breathless and anxious.
But he ran on until he came to a side street, shadowed with garden
walls and villas and greenery. Slipping into this, he immured himself
in the midnight silences, to be alone with the contending forces that
tore at him.

If his companion was right, and such things as this made up Romance,
then, after all, the drama of life had lost none of its bewilderment.
For the woman he had seen between the floating purple curtains was his
own wife.

CHAPTER III

THE SHADOWING PAST

Durkin's first tangible feeling was a passion to lose and submerge
himself in the muffling midnight silences, the silences of those
outwardly quiet gardens at heart so old in sin and pain.

He felt the necessity for some sudden and sweeping readjustment, and
his cry for solitude was like that of the child wounded in spirit, or
that of the wild animal sorely hurt in body. Before he could face life
again, he felt, he had to build up about him the sustaining fabric of
some new and factitious faith.

But as intelligence slowly emerged from the mist