e her distracted
gaze swam a view of the formal garden, a-glimmer like a corner of
fairy-land with the hundreds of tiny lamps half concealed amid the
foliage of its shrubs and hedges.

She knew that she must rouse herself and be seen below; not only must
her message take its place with its twenty-odd fellows in the
mail-box, but nothing could seem so incriminating as prolonged and
deliberate absence from the fete.

Yet she had little desire now for what two hours since had seemed a
prospect of bewitching promise. The music rose and fell in magic
measure without its erstwhile power to stir her pulses. There was
not one in all that company below for whom she cared or who
cared for her, none but whose interest in her presence or absence was
as slight as hers; and her mood shrank from the thought of such casual
and conventional gallantries as the affair would inevitably bring
forth. She was in no humour tonight to dance and banter and coquette
with an empty and desolate heart.

Thus it was made clear to her that she had never been, and never would
be, in such humour; that in just this circumstance resided all her
insuperable dissociation from these people of light-hearted lives;
that this was why she was and forever must remain, however long and
intimate her life among them, an outsider; because what she needed and
demanded, the blind and inarticulate impulse which had made her aspire
to their society, was not the need of a wide social life, but the need
of a narrow and constricting love.

And all the love that she had thus far found in this earthly paradise
had proved a delusion, a mockery and a snare.

Presently she stirred with reluctance, sighed, resigned herself to the
prospect of a night of hollow, grinning merriment, and turned back to
contemplation of that importunate card. And while still she hesitated,
pencil poised, with neither knock nor any sort of announcement
whatsoever the door flew open, and through it, like a fury in a
fairy's dress, flew Mrs. Standish clothed as Columbine.

She shut the door sharply, put her back to it, and keeping her gaze
fixed on the amazed girl, turned the key.

Her passion was as evident as it was senseless. Bare of the mask that
swung from silken strings caught in her fingers, her face shone bright
with the incandescence of seething agitation. Her eyes were hard, her
mouth tight-lipped, her temper patently set on a hair-trigger.

Quite automatically, on this interruption,