g which she had caused, a penalty that the gods of the doors
that close behind our birth were measuring to her. Ordinarily she would
have realised that in some anterior, enigmatic and forgotten life, she,
too, had debased herself and that this cross was the punishment for that
debasement. Ordinarily the creed would have sustained her. But as she
clutched at it, it receded. Only the cross remained and that was too
heavy.

In the drawing-room an indifferent nymph pointed a finger at hours, all
of which wound and of which the last one kills.

In that room Mrs. Austen was writing a note. Addressed to Montagu
Paliser, Jr., esqre., it asked him to dinner.

X

In the subway, the following evening, Cassy saw a man eyeing her. She
turned and saw another man who also was eyeing her. On the seat opposite
two women were discussing her clothes.

The clothes, her own manufacture, were not of the fashion, not behind
it, or ahead of it, but above it. A mode, or a mood of her own, they
consisted in a blue silk smock and a yellow cloth skirt. On the sleeves
and about the neck of the smock there was also yellow, touches of it,
with which the skirt married. Therewith she was hatless, rebellious and
handsome.

Accustomed to the inquisitiveness of appraising eyes, she ignored the
women as, already, she had ignored the men. With obliterating unconcern,
she reduced them to the fluidity of the inchoate. Other matters occupied
her, and, primarily, a trick, an extremely shabby one, from which she
had not yet recovered.

The day before, after paying the butcher, the baker, and the punctual
and pertinacious agent, she had scaled the walk-up where she found her
father with the violin, on which, an hour earlier, Lennox had loaned her
the money.

The spectacle flabbergasted her. Then, realising what Lennox had done,
his iniquity struck her as hateful. At once, in an effort to account,
however imaginatively, for the apparent sorcery of it all, she tried to
invent a fairy-tale. But the tale would not come. Nor was it needed. Her
father dispensed with any. Impatient of detail, as the artist usually
is, he required none. The extraordinary perspicacity of the police who
had nailed and returned the violin instanter, this wizardry that would
have thrown any one else into stupors of bewilderment, interested him
not at all. He had the violin. That sufficed. The rest did not matter.

It mattered though and monumentally to Cassy. To owe the bu