of the agitation about it brought the reassuring sense that he had
exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did not ease his
conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of obscurity:
he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and thrust
into the soothing darkness of a cell.

But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he
chanced to turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of
the Horoscope, to which he settled down with his cigar, confronted
him, on its first page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was
a reproduction of the photograph that had stood so long on his
desk. The desiccating air of memory had turned her into the mere
abstraction of a woman, and this unexpected evocation seemed to
bring her nearer than she had ever been in life. Was it because
he understood her better? He looked long into her eyes; little
personal traits reached out to him like caresses--the tired droop
of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke, the
movements of her long expressive hands. All that was feminine in
her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her
unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had
developed in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in
even this poor semblance of herself. For a moment he found
consolation in the thought that, at any cost, they had thus been
brought together; then a flood of shame rushed over him. Face to
face with her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of
consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a renovating
anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused from
the creeping lethargy of death. . . .

He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his