as gone every one
was going from her.

XXIV

THE COMIC MASK

She listened to the sound of wheels, first rattling loud on the gravel,
slowly growing fainter. Then stillness was with her again, and
inanition. She looked around and up, and had no start at seeing Clara's
small face watching her over the gallery of the rotunda. It seemed to
her that appearance was natural to her existence now, like her shadow.
She looked away. When she raised her eyes again Clara was coming down
the stairs, and even at that distance Flora saw she carried something in
her hand--something flat and small and wrapped in a filmy bit of paper.

Out of the chaos of her feeling rose the solitary thought--the picture
which she had bought that morning, the picture of Farrell Wand. She
watched it drawing near her with wonder. She sat up trembling. She had a
great longing and a horror to tear away the filmy paper and see Kerr at
last brutally revealed. She could not have told afterward whether Clara
spoke to her. She was conscious of her pausing; conscious of the faint
rustle of her skirt passing; conscious, finally, that the small swathed
square was in her hand.

She tore the tissue paper through. She held a photograph, a mounted
kodak print. She made out the background to be sky and water and the
rail of a ship with silhouettes of heads and shoulders, a jungle of
black; and in the middle distance caught in full motion the single
figure of a man, back turned and head in profile. He was moving from her
out of the picture, and with the first look she knew it was not Kerr.

Her first thought was that there had been a trick played on her! But
no--across the bottom of the picture, in Judge Buller's full round hand,
was written, "Farrell Wand boarding the _Loch Ettive_." She held it high
to the light. Clara had been faithful to her bargain. It was the
picture that had deceived her. She studied it with passionate
earnestness. She did not know the bearded profile; but in the burly
shoulders, in the set and swing of the body in motion, more than all in
the lowering, peering aspect of the whole figure, she began to see a
familiar something. She held it away from her by both thin edges, and
that aspect swelled and swelled in her startled eyes, until suddenly the
figure in the picture seemed to be moving from her, not up a gang-plank,
but through a glare of sun over grass between broad beds of flowers.

She was faint. She was going to fall. She cau