e she
had always shrunk from it. Percy Gryce, for instance, had been in love
with her--every one at Bellomont had supposed them to be engaged, and her
dismissal of him was thought inexplicable. This view of the Gryce
incident chimed too well with Selden's mood not to be instantly adopted
by him, with a flash of retrospective contempt for what had once seemed
the obvious solution. If rejection there had been--and he wondered now
that he had ever doubted it!--then he held the key to the secret, and the
hillsides of Bellomont were lit up, not with sunset, but with dawn. It
was he who had wavered and disowned the face of opportunity--and the joy
now warming his breast might have been a familiar inmate if he had
captured it in its first flight.

It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its wings in
Gerty's heart dropped to earth and lay still. She sat facing Selden,
repeating mechanically: "No, she has never been understood----" and all
the while she herself seemed to be sitting in the centre of a great glare
of comprehension. The little confidential room, where a moment ago their
thoughts had touched elbows like their chairs, grew to unfriendly
vastness, separating her from Selden by all the length of her new vision
of the future--and that future stretched out interminably, with her
lonely figure toiling down it, a mere speck on the solitude.

"She is herself with a few people only; and you are one of them," she
heard Selden saying. And again: "Be good to her, Gerty, won't you?" and:
"She has it in her to become whatever she is believed to be--you'll help
her by believing the best of her?"

The words beat on Gerty's brain like the sound of a language which has
seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to be
unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily--that was all! There
had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and that third had
taken her own place. She tried to follow what he was saying, to cling to
her own part in the talk--but it was all as meaningless as the boom of
waves in a drowning head, and she felt, as the drowning may feel, that to
sink would be nothing beside the pain of struggling to keep up.

Selden rose, and she drew a deep breath, feeling that soon she could
yield to the blessed waves.

"Mrs. Fisher's? You say she was dining there? There's music afterward; I
believe I had a card from her." He glanced at the foolish pink-faced
clock that was drumming out