t her into contacts and promiscuities from which
she should have been kept free. Even so no great harm had been done,
especially in the case of a woman with her knowledge of the world. None
had been so much as threatened until the arrival on the scene of a young
Frenchman, a friend of Mrs. Scadding's. Edith then found it necessary to
submit to an introduction with daily, almost hourly, hazards of
encounter.

He was a young Frenchman like many hundreds of his kind, who might have
been a finished sketch in sepia. Sepia would have done justice to the
even tan of his complexion, to the soft-brown of his eyes, of his hair,
of his mustache, and rendered the rich chestnut which was oftener than
not his choice for clothes. Gertie flirted with him outrageously--there
was no other phrase for it. It was the kind of flirting one was obliged
to consider innocent, since the alternative would have been too
appalling. Edith opted for the innocent construction, lending an abashed
countenance to the situation out of loyalty to the sisterhood of
loneliness. It was a countenance that grew more abashed whenever, in the
process of lending it, her eye met that of the man who had constituted
himself, she was convinced, her silent guardian.

Fortunately, Mrs. G. Cottle Scadding took herself off to Italy, the
young Frenchman disappearing at the same time. It was a new proof to
Edith of the depth of need to which she had come down that she missed
them. She missed their frivolity and inconsequentiality because they
were the only interests she had. She was thrown back, therefore, on her
own desolation and on her memories of Chip.

She made the discovery with some alarm that Chip was becoming to her
more and more the center of a group of memories. She was losing him.
That is, she was losing him as an actuality; she was losing him as the
pivot round which her life had swung, even since her knowledge of his
great treason. She was no more appalled by the loss than by the
perception of her own volatility.

It was a perception that deepened when, some fortnight after Gertie's
departure, the young Frenchman reappeared. "He's come back on my
account," was Edith's instant reflection. She was indignant; and yet
something else stirred in her that was not indignation, and to which she
was afraid to give a name. Perhaps there was no name to give it. As far
as she could analyze its elements, they lay in the twin facts that she
was still young enough to be at