othing of the ordinary woman's feeling of guilt towards her
husband. The intimate bond between herself and George Goring did not
seem in any relation the accidental one between her and Ian Stewart. She
had never before faced the question, the possibility of a choice between
the two. Now she weighed it with characteristic swiftness and decision.
She reasoned that Ian had enjoyed a period of great happiness in his
marriage with her, in spite of the singularity of its conditions; but
that now, while Milly could never satisfy his fastidious nature, she
herself had grown to be a hinderance, a dissonance in his life. Could
she strike a blow which would sever him from her, he would suffer
cruelly, no doubt; but it would send him back again to the student's
life, the only life that could bring him honor, and in the long run
satisfaction. And that life would not be lonely, because Tony, so
completely his father's child, would be with him. As for herself and
George Goring, she had no fear of the future. They two were strong
enough to hew and build alone their own Palace of Delight. Her intuitive
knowledge of the world informed her that, in the long run, society, if
firmly disregarded, admits the claim of certain persons to go their own
way--even rapidly admits it, though they be the merest bleating strays
from the common fold, should they haply be possessed of rank or fortune.
The way lay plain enough before Mildred, were it not for that Other. But
she, the shadowy one, deep down in her limbo, laid a finger on the gate
of that Earthly Paradise and held it, as inflexibly as any armed
archangel, against the master key of her enemy's intelligence, the
passionate assaults of her heart.

Mildred, however, was one who found it hard, if not impossible, to
acquiesce in defeat. Two o'clock boomed from the watching towers of
Westminster over the great city. She rose from her bed, cold as a marble
figure on a monument, and went to the dressing-table to take off her few
and simple ornaments. The mirror on it was the same from which that
alien smile had peered twelve months ago, filling the sad soul of Milly
with trembling fear and sinister foreboding. The white face that stole
into its shadowy depths to-night, and looked Mildred in the eyes, was in
a manner new to her also. It had a new seriousness, a new intensity, as
of a woman whose vital energies, once spending themselves in mere
corruscations, in mere action for action's sake, were now c