large, incomprehensive eyes.

"I can't tell you why."

"Katherine, then--it _is_ prettier. Do you know, I sometimes think it's
better, oh, infinitely better, that he should have died."

Katherine rose from her seat, to end it, looking down on the kneeling
figure, as she answered bitterly--

"It was indeed--infinitely better."

But irony, like so many other things of the kind, was beyond Audrey.

"I suppose I ought to go now," she said, rising. Katherine made no
answer.

Audrey went away to get ready, a little reluctantly, for she had so much
more to say. It had never occurred to her to be jealous of Katherine.
That may have been either because she did not know, or because she did
not care. She had been so sure of Vincent.

Presently she came back with her hat on. She carried her bearskins in
her hand, and under the shade of the broad black beaver her face wore an
expression of anxious thought.

"Katherine,"--she held out her cape and muff, and Katherine remembered
that they were those which Vincent had given her,--"I suppose I can wear
my furs still, even if I _am_ in mourning?"

There was neither scorn nor irony in the look that Katherine turned on
her, and Audrey understood this time. As plainly as looks can speak, it
condemned her as altogether lighter than vanity itself; and while
condemning, it forgave her.

"_He_ gave them to me, you know," she said at last. Audrey's pathos
generally came too late.

She drove away, wrapped in her furs, and for once unconscious of her
own beauty, so dissatisfied was she with the part she had played in the
great tragedy. Somehow her parts seemed always to dwindle this way in
retrospect.

That afternoon a parcel arrived, addressed to Hardy by his publishers.
Katherine opened it. It contained early copies of the Pioneer-book, the
book that after all Vincent was never to see.

She saw with a pang her own design blazing in gold on the cover, and her
frontispiece sketch of the author. Then she turned to the dedication
page, and read--

TO HER
WHO HAS INSPIRED
ALL THAT THERE MAY BE OF GOOD IN IT
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
BY HER AFFECTIONATE COUSIN,
VINCENT HARDY.

It was an epitaph.

CHAPTER XXVI

One day's work among the poor of St. Teresa's, Lambeth, is enough to
exhaust you, if you are at all sensitive and highly strung, and Audrey
had had three days of it. No wonder, then, that as she leaned back i