sinking of the liner, followed, by Sherston, by a period of strange,
painful suspense, filled with the eager scanning of lists, cables
to and from America, finally terminated by an official intimation
that poor Kitty had gone down in, and with, the ship.

Sherston's imagination was inconveniently vivid, and for a few
poignant weeks his wife's horrible end haunted him. But after a
while he forced himself to take a long holiday in Greece, and from
there he came back with his nerves in better order than they had
ever been.

Fate, which so seldom interferes with kindly intention in the lives
of men, had cut what had become a strangling knot, and Kitty, from
a dreadful, never-forgotten burden, had become a rather touching,
piteous memory, growing ever dimmer as first the months, and then
the years, slipped by.

Even so, her ghost sufficiently often haunted this large room, and
the other apartments which composed Sherston's set of chambers, to
make him determine that Miss Pomeroy should never come there. And
she, being in this as unlike other, commonplace, young woman as she
was in everything else, had never put him to the pain of finding
an insincere excuse for his unwillingness to show her the place in
which he lived and worked....


The coming night stretched long and bleak before to-morrow's
bridegroom. There were fourteen hours to live through before he
could even see Helen, for the time of the marriage had been fixed
for eleven o'clock.