gradually learned that he stood for the venture on which Mrs.
Aubyn had irretrievably staked her all. It was not the kind of
figure he cared to cut. He had no fancy for leaving havoc in his
wake and would have preferred to sow a quick growth of oblivion in
the spaces wasted by his unconsidered inroads; but if he supplied
the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn's business to see to the
raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed to throw his own
reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they might have
stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
affections.

It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on
his bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the
small change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded
passion, and the luxuries it allowed her made him, even then,
dimly aware that she had the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.

Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly
wrote him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had
died, she had no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more
scope than New York to her expanding personality. She was already
famous and her laurels were yet unharvested.

For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power
before she made the final effort of escape. They had not met for
over a year, but of course he could not let her sail without
seeing her. She came to New York the day before her departure,
and they spent its last hours together. Glennard had planned no
course of action--he simply meant to let himself drift. They both