turned her and rattled back toward the village, and
stopped before his own lodging. He asked Enfield to hold the horse and
went in. In a little while he came out and put a valise in the wagon.

"What time does the night train pass?"

"12.05."

He drove to the station, gave Enfield the reins, and put the valise on
the platform, then stood on the step of the wagon.

"Drive the horse to Mitchel's for me and tell him to send me his
bill."

He lingered a moment, then offered his hand.

"Good-night, Lawrence!"

"Good-night!" and they held each other's hands firmly but gravely.

"Will you take a cigar now, Lawrence?"

"Yes!"

Loramer thrust his cigar-case into his hand, wheeled round and marched
into the waiting-room, holding the valise with a strong grasp, and
putting his head a little on one side.

That affair was a part of the long, slow process of Enfield's
alienation from Cora, but only one of many steps. He was tenacious and
slow to change, and she held him by cords of memory and dependence as
well as affection. But by degrees he came to see clearly that he had
been wilfully blind, that he had always known but would not regard
that she was not at all the girl he had enshrined. The end was but a
trifle--the proverbial last straw. And though he laughed when she took
him to task and felt a barbarous enjoyment in their reversed
relations, and in her show of something like consternation, he more
than once afterward felt the yearning of the converted heathen toward
his broken gods.

Loramer and Enfield spent a week together on Cape Cod the same summer
and took refuge from a storm in one of the huts provided for
ship-wrecked people. Listening to the deafening roar of the wind and
the surf, they spoke of Cora Brainard. Loramer congratulated Lawrence
upon his freedom. And he went on:

"I don't know what there is in the little minx. All the old ladies in
Elmtree think her a kind of saint, but she didn't strike me in that
light. She came near making a ---- fool of me, but I can't remember
anything she said, only how she laughed and her eyes sparkled."

"I can't laugh at her," Enfield answered. "She hasn't made herself and
she hasn't had a good time. She doesn't know anything and doesn't care
for anything. She has a wonderful tact, an eye for color, and an
instinct for the current fashion in what goes for literature and art.
But she has no appreciation of anything permanent and no lasting
enjoyment of anything. I