hat I wanted to thank you for. I wanted to tell you
that I have always remembered; and that I have tried--tried hard . . ."

She broke off suddenly. Her tears had risen again, and in drawing out her
handkerchief her fingers touched the packet in the folds of her dress. A
wave of colour suffused her, and the words died on her lips. Then she
lifted her eyes to his and went on in an altered voice.

"I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless
person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just
a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped
out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one
finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be
thrown out into the rubbish heap--and you don't know what it's like in
the rubbish heap!"

Her lips wavered into a smile--she had been distracted by the whimsical
remembrance of the confidences she had made to him, two years earlier, in
that very room. Then she had been planning to marry Percy Gryce--what was
it she was planning now?

The blood had risen strongly under Selden's dark skin, but his emotion
showed itself only in an added seriousness of manner.

"You have something to tell me--do you mean to marry?" he said abruptly.

Lily's eyes did not falter, but a look of wonder, of puzzled
self-interrogation, formed itself slowly in their depths. In the light of
his question, she had paused to ask herself if her decision had really
been taken when she entered the room.

"You always told me I should have to come to it sooner or later!" she
said with a faint smile.

"And you have come to it now?"

"I shall have to come to it--presently. But there is something else I
must come to first." She paused again, trying to transmit to her voice
the steadiness of her recovered smile. "There is some one I must say
goodbye to. Oh, not YOU--we are sure to see each other again--but the
Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are
going to part, and I have brought her back to you--I am going to leave
her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like
to think that she has stayed with you--and she'll be no trouble, she'll
take up no room."

She went toward him, and put out her hand, still smiling. "Will you let
her stay with you?" she asked.

He caught her hand, and she felt in his the vibration of feeling that had
not yet risen to