ernoon,
so as to be beside her tea-table in the drawing-room before any one
appeared. And yet, the minute came when she cast aside all solicitudes
and hesitations.

Going up the pathway leading to the opening opposite her house, she
noticed a figure standing between the two iron posts. It was not now a
figure in gray, but one in white--in white, with a rose-colored sash,
and carrying a rose-colored parasol. Edith quickened her pace
unconsciously, urged on by fear lest the girl should move away before
she had time to reach her. In spite of a rush of incoherent emotions she
was able to reflect that she was perfectly cool, entirely
self-possessed. She was merely dominated by a need--the need of coming
face to face with this person and seeing who she was. She had no idea
what she herself would do or say, or whether or not she would do or say
anything. That was secondary; it would take care of itself. The
immediate impulse was too imperative to resist. She must at least _see_,
even if nothing came of her doing so. If she had any thought of a
resulting consequence it was in the assumption that her presence as wife
and woman of the world would dispel the noxious thing she had been
striving to combat for the past two months, as the sun dissipates a
miasma.

But her approaches were careful and courteous. She, too, carried a
parasol, negligently, gracefully, over the shoulder. It served to
conceal her face till she had passed the stranger by a pace or two and
glanced casually backward. She might have done so, however, with full
deliberation, for the woman took no notice of her at all. Her misty,
troubled blue eyes, of which the lids were red as if from weeping, were
fixed on the house across the way.

Edith saw now that, notwithstanding a certain youthfulness of dress and
bearing, this was a woman, not a girl. She was thirty-five at least,
though the face was of the blond, wistful, Scandinavian type that fades
from pallor to pallor without being perceptibly stamped by time. It was
pallor like that of the white rose after it has passed the perfection of
its bloom and before it has begun to wither.

Edith paused, still without drawing the misty eyes on herself.

"Do you know the people in that house?" she asked, at last.

The woman looked at her, not inquiringly or with much show of
comprehension, but vaguely and as from a distance. Edith repeated the
question.

The thin, rather bloodless lips parted. The answer seemed to