lf-love
was hurt, as it would have been if a dog had shrunk from her advances;
for Audrey was not accustomed to have her favours rejected. She was
further irritated by the ostentatious affection of the child's mother as
she helped it through the railings with shrill cries of "There then,
blessums! Did she then, the naughty lydy!" And when baby echoed "Naughty
lydy!" it was as if the two-year-old had judged her.

She sat a little while longer, and then went away. As she rose she
looked sadly back at the family group. The man was lying on his back and
letting the children walk about on the top of him. Baby had found peace
in sucking an orange and stamping on her father's waist. The woman was
strewing paper bags and orange-peel around her in a fine disorder, while
she thriftily packed the remains of their meal in a basket. Audrey
shuddered; their arrangements were all so ugly and unpleasant. And
yet--they were married, they were respectable, they were happy, these
terrible people; while she--she was miserable. She had no sense of
justice; and she rebelled against the policy of Nature, who leaves her
coarser children free, and levies her taxes on the aristocracy of
feeling.

The sordid domesticity of the scene had glorified by contrast her own
dramatic mood. Poor Audrey! She hated vulgarity, and yet she was trying
to lay hold on "the great things of life" through the vulgarest of all
life's tragedies.

* * * * *

Langley would be in town again in a week. He would ask if she had made
up her mind; and she knew now too well the answer she would give him.

But Langley was not in town again in a week, nor yet in a fortnight. And
when, at the end of six weeks, he did come back, he came back
married--to Miss Alison Fraser.

Nobody ever knew how that came about. Miss Gladys Armstrong, who may be
considered an authority, maintained that as Wyndham had the pride which
is supposed to be the peculiar property of the Evil One, he could never
have proposed to the same woman twice. Consequently Miss Fraser must
have proposed to him. Perhaps she had; there are ways of doing these
things, and whatever Alison Fraser did she did gracefully. As for her
private conscience, in refusing him with conscious magnanimity she had
done no good to anybody, not even herself; in marrying him finally she
had saved the situation, without knowing that there was a situation to
be saved.

The news threw Audrey into what