the sweetness and terror of it, the keen delight in the sense of danger.  There had been weeks of companionship before he had defined their position; it occurred to her now that he had managed her with the skill and coolness of a man who understood women and could keep his head, even while quickened with all that he inspired.  She also recalled, her lips curling into a cynical grin, that she had felt the same promptings for spiritual abandonment, of high desire to help this man where he was weak, to restore some of his lost ideals, or to replace them with better; to root out the weeds which she recognized in his nature, and to coax the choked bulbs of those fairer flowers which may have been there before he and the world knew each other too well.  Then she relived the days and nights of torment when she had walked the floor wringing her hands, barely eating and sleeping.  She recalled that she had even beaten the walls and flung herself against them.

The procession was startlingly familiar and fresh of lineament; even the moments of rapture, whose memory is soonest to fade, and the fitful solace she had found, in those last days, imagining what might have been.

She got up and walked about the room, half amused, half appalled.  “What does it mean?” she thought.  “Is it that there is an impalpable entity in this world for me, and that part of it is in one man and part in another?  Is the man who has the larger share the one I really love?  Is that the explanation of loving a second time?  It certainly is very like—­ridiculously like.”

She turned her thoughts to Hedworth, but they swung aside and pointed straight to the other man.  She half expected to see his ghost framed in the dark window, he seemed so close.  She found herself living the past again and again, instinct with its sensations.  He had had much in his life to cark and harrow, and the old sympathy and tenderness vibrated aloud, and little out of tune.  She wondered what had become of him, what he was doing at the moment.  She did not believe that he had loved any woman since; he had nearly exhausted his capacity for loving when he met her.

And at the same time she was distinctly conscious that if the two men stood before her she should spring to Hedworth.  Nevertheless, when she conjured his image, the shadowy figure of the other man stood behind, looking over Hedworth’s shoulder, with the half-cynical smile which had only left his mouth when he had told her, with white face whose muscles were free of his will for the moment, that he loved her.

“Is it the old love that is demanding its rights, not the man?” she thought.  “Is it true, then, that all we women want is love, and that it is as welcome in one attractive frame as another?  That it is not Hedworth I love, but what he gives me?  Now that I even suspect this, can I be happy?  Will that ghost always look over his shoulder?”