in a corner of her brougham, she saw the world pass on flashing
wheels along the asphalt; she saw the April sunshine slanting across
brown-stone mansions and the glass-fronted facades of shops; ... she
looked without seeing.

So Langham had sent her his dog! In the first year of her widowhood she
had first met Langham; she was then twenty-one. In the second year of
her widowhood Langham had offered himself, and, with the declaration on
his lips, had seen the utter hopelessness of his offer. They had not met
since then. And now, in the third year of her widowhood, he offered her
his dog!

She had at first intended to keep the dog. Knowing nothing of animals,
discouraged from all sporting fads by a husband who himself was devoted
to animals dedicated to sport, she had quietly acquiesced in her
husband's dictum that "horse-women and dog-women made a man ill!"--and
so dismissed any idea she might have entertained towards the harboring
of the four-footed.

A miserable consciousness smote her: why had she allowed the memory of
her husband to fade so amazingly in these last two months of early
spring? Of late, when she wished to fix her thoughts upon her late
husband and to conjure his face before her closed eyes, she found that
the mental apparition came with more and more difficulty.

Sitting in a corner of her brougham, the sharp rhythm of her horses'
hoofs tuning her thoughts, she quietly endeavored to raise that
cherished mental spectre, but could not, until by hazard she remembered
the portrait of her husband hanging in the smoking-room.

But instantly she strove to put that away; the portrait was by Sargent,
a portrait she had always disliked, because the great painter had
painted an expression into her husband's face which she had never seen
there. An aged and unbearable aunt of hers had declared that Sargent
painted beneath the surface; she resented the suggestion, because what
she read beneath the surface of her husband's portrait sent hot blood
into her face.

Thinking of these things, she saw the spring sunshine gilding the gray
branches of the park trees. Here and there elms spread tinted with
green; chestnuts and maples were already in the full glory of new
leaves; the leafless twisted tangles of wistaria hung thick with scented
purple bloom; everywhere the scarlet blossoms of the Japanese quince
glowed on naked shrubs, bedded in green lawns.

Her husband had loved the country.... There was one spot in th