rder, which would have
been very natural and pleasing at any other time, but he did not stop
to question. Claire waited until the door had closed behind him, then
ran to Marion, with anxiety pictured in her face.

"What is it, Marion?" she exclaimed.

"Oh, Claire, Claire!" cried Marion, breaking. "I'm so--so--unhappy!"

Then she flung herself into Claire's arms, weeping without restraint.

CHAPTER XII

SUNNYSIDES

Marion was not alone in her misery; but knowledge of this, had it by
any chance come to her, would not have eased her heart, though it
might indeed have hardened it a little against more suffering to
come.

Toward bedtime of the eighth day after that encounter at the glade of
the columbines, Philip Haig sat stiffly silent in his armchair,
staring into the fire. His brow was dark with discontent, his cheeks
had paled with the slow ebbing of the tide of passion that had swept
over him. It had begun to rise, though he was not then aware of it, or
barely aware of it, the day Marion had halted him in the road below
his ranch house; it had reached its flood as he drove away from her
and left the bouquet of columbines in her limp hands.

Who was this girl? And why had she come to torture him? To him she now
appeared as the incarnation of his tragedy. In her the Past, from
which he had fled to the far corners of the earth, hiding his trail in
seas and deserts and in stagnant backwaters of humanity, had tracked
him down at last. And all the grief and bitterness and hatred that he
had beaten down, or thought he had beaten down, had returned to rend
and tear him.

Two beings he had loved, and to them he had given, to each in a
different way, all his heart and soul and mind: his father and--that
other. She had come to him at his most susceptible age, when, devoted
only to art, he knew nothing of the world--a green boy, the wise ones
had called him. She had come to him with all the surprise and wonder
of a revelation, a coronation, a fulfillment, a golden epiphany. He
had attributed to her such spiritual perfections as should have
gone with her beauty and her grace; worshipped her for all that she
was not and all that he was himself. And she had deceived him,
exploited him, plundered him,--and laughed at him when by chance, one
tragic, intolerable night, he found her out. And the next morning,
as if his cup were not already full, he had received a cablegram,
in his attic studio in Paris, telling him tha