wept then, heart-broken tears of disappointment, disillusion, loneliness;
tears for the bitter pity of it all; for the wasting and wasted
opportunities; for the common aim never understood or planned together;
for the precious hours lived in an air of artificial happiness and social
excitement; for a perfect understanding missed; for the touch which no
longer thrilled.

But the end of it all must come. She was looking frail and delicate, and
her beauty, newly refined, and with a fresh charm, as of mystery or pain,
was touched by feverishness. An old impatience once hers was vanished,
and Kate Heaver would have given a month's wages for one of those flashes
of petulance of other days ever followed by a smile. Now the smile was
all too often there, the patient smile which comes to those who have
suffered. Hardness she felt at times, where Eglington was concerned,
for he seemed to need her now not at all, to be self-contained, self-
dependent--almost arrogantly so; but she did not show it, and she was
outwardly patient.

In his heart of hearts Eglington believed that she loved him, that her
interest in David was only part of her idealistic temperament--the
admiration of a woman for a man of altruistic aims; but his hatred of
David, of what David was, and of his irrefutable claims, reacted on her.
Perverseness and his unhealthy belief that he would master her in the
end, that she would one day break down and come to him, willing to take
his view in all things, and to be his slave--all this drove him farther
and farther on a fatal, ever-broadening path.

Success had spoiled him. He applied his gifts in politics, daringly
unscrupulous, superficially persuasive, intellectually insinuating, to
his wife; and she, who had been captured once by all these things, was