ined. Indeed, if one
interpreted their attitude at its face value, the shoe was on the
other foot.

And they brimmed the alleged hollowness of their days with an
extraordinary amount of running about. There was incessant shifting of
interest from one focal point to another of the colony, a perpetually
restless swarming hither and yon to some new centre of distraction, a
continual kaleidoscopic parade of the most wonderful and extravagant
clothing the world has ever seen.

To the outsider, of course, all this was not merely entertaining and
novel, if much as she had imagined it would be, it was more--it was
fascination, it was enchantment, it was the joy of living made
manifest, it was life.

If only this bubble might not burst!

Of course, it must; even if not too good to be true, it was too
wonderful to be enduring; the clock strikes twelve for every
Cinderella, and few are blessed enough to be able to leave behind them
a matchless slipper.

But whatever happened, nothing now could prevent her carrying to
her grave the memory of this one glorious flight: "better to have
loved and lost--" The wraith of an old refrain troubled Sally's
reverie. How did it go? "Now die the dream--"

Saturate with exquisite melancholy, she leaned out over the
window-sill into the warm, still moonlight, drinking deep of the
wine-scent of roses, dwelling upon the image of him whom she loved so
madly.

What were the words again?

". . . The past is not in vain, For wholly as it was your life,
Can never be again, my dear, Can never be again."

She shook a mournful head, sadly envisaging the loveliness of the
world through a mist of facile tears; that was too exquisitely, too
poignantly true of her own plight; for, wholly as it was, her life
could never be again.

And not for worlds would she have had it otherwise.

Below, in the deserted drawing-room, a time-mellowed clock chimed
sonorously the hour of two.

Two o'clock of a Sunday morning, and all well; long since Gosnold
House had lapsed into decent silence; an hour ago she had heard the
last laggard footsteps, the last murmured good nights in the
corridor outside her door as the men-folk took themselves reluctantly
off to their beds.

She leaned still farther out over the sill, peering along the gleaming
white facade; no window showed a light that she could see. She
listened acutely; not a sound but the muttering of fretful little
waves and the drowsy complaint of