herself now in sad paraphrase, "And
though he loves me little, yet he is my husband, and for what he is it
may be that I am in some sense responsible." Yet he is my husband! All
that it was came to her; the closed door, the drawn blinds; the intimacy
which shut them away from all the world; the things said which can
only be said without desecration between two honest souls who love each
other; and that sweet isolation which makes marriage a separate world,
with its own sacred revelation. This she had known; this had been; and
though the image of the sacred thing had been defaced, yet the shrine
was not destroyed.

For she believed that each had kept the letter of the law; that,
whatever his faults, he had turned his face to no other woman. If she
had not made his heart captive and drawn him by an ever-shortening cord
of attraction, yet she was sure that none other had any influence over
him, that, as he had looked at her in those short-lived days of his
first devotion, he looked at no other. The way was clear yet. There was
nothing irretrievable, nothing irrevocable, which would for ever stain
the memory and tarnish the gold of life when the perfect love should be
minted. Whatever faults of mind or disposition or character were his--or
hers--there were no sins against the pledges they had made, nor the bond
into which they had entered. Life would need no sponge. Memory might
still live on without a wound or a cowl of shame.

It was all part of the music to which she listened, and she was almost
oblivious of the brilliant throng, the crowded boxes, or of the Duchess
of Snowdon sitting near her strangely still, now and again scanning the
beautiful face beside her with a reflective look. The Duchess loved the
girl--she was but a girl, after all--as she had never loved any of her
sex; it had come to be the last real interest of her life. To her eyes,
dimmed with much seeing, blurred by a garish kaleidoscope of fashionable
life, there had come a look which was like the ghost of a look she had,
how many decades ago.

Presently, as she saw Hylda's eyes withdraw from the stage, and look at
her with a strange, soft moisture and a new light in them, she laid her
fan confidently on her friend's knee, and said in her abrupt whimsical
voice: "You like it, my darling; your eyes are as big as saucers. You
look as if you'd been seeing things, not things on that silly stage, but
what Verdi felt when he wrote the piece, or something of