hiding her face, burst into a storm of tears.  Ishmael stood by her silently; like most men, he was inarticulate at the great moments, and Blanche sobbed on.  She who for so many years had made herself believe what she wished, had gagged and blindfolded her own soul till truth showed its face to her in vain, was now stripped of all bandages and having facts passed relentlessly before her.  She had made Ishmael love her, as she had so many men, by seeming something she was not; she had fallen in love with Ishmael herself, and must keep up the pretence of being the woman he thought her, for for her real self such a man as Ishmael could have no comprehension.  She told herself that if they could only have married she would in time have grown to be the woman he thought her, and she railed bitterly at Fate.  For her there only remained the old path, and the knowledge filled her with a leaden weariness.  But for Ishmael—­what remained for him?  Never again would he be able to delight in the world of hopes he had set up with such care.  What could she give him to help him face reality?  The plighted word, steadfastness, friendship, none of these gifts were Blanche’s to bestow, but she could at least send him away his own man again—­at the sacrifice of her vanity.  A struggle shook her mind, all the well-trained sophistries warring against a new clarity of vision.  There were two courses open to her—­she might hoodwink Ishmael, bewilder him with words, show herself as grieving, exquisite, far above him, yet in spirit unchangeably his; or she might show him the truth, let him see her as the world-ridden, egotistical creature of flimsy emotions and tangible ambitions that she was.  If she chose the first way, Ishmael would have an unshattered ideal to take away and set up in his lonely heart; but it placed forgetfulness out of the question for a man of his temperament.  If she decided on the second course, he would have a time of bitter disillusionment, but could some day love again, perhaps all the sooner for the shock; Blanche knew that nothing sends a man so surely into a woman’s arms as a rebuff from another woman.  In her heart she saw the finer course, yet the little voices clamoured, told her she would be destroying the ideality of a delicate nature, spoiling something that could never be the same again:  on the one side whatever there was of self-abnegation in her love, on the other the habit of a lifetime.

She raised her head, and her glance was arrested idly by a deserted spider’s web woven from branch to branch of the elder hedge and wavering gently in the breeze.  Some seed husks had been blown into the meshes and clung there lightly, cream-hued against the pearly threads.  Blanche found herself picturing the disgust of the departed spider over this innovation on flies.  “It is like my life,” she thought, “blown husks for bread,” and the tears welling in her eyes made the seeds seem to swell and the web run together in a silvery blur.  The moment of idle thought had taken the keen edge from her ideas, and, like many another, she tried to compromise.