a day. Out of the deeps of her soul this mist of a pure selflessness
rose, the spirit of that idealism which was the real chord of sympathy
between her and Egypt.

Yes, she would, this once again, try to win the heart of this man; and so
reach what was deeper than heart, and so also give him that without which
his life must be a failure in the end, as Sybil Eglington had said. How
often had those bitter anguished words of his mother rung in her ears--
"So brilliant and unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, so sure of
winning a great place in the world . . . so calculating and determined
and ambitious !" They came to her now, flashed between the eager
solicitous eyes of her mind and the scene of a perfect and everlasting
reconciliation which it conjured up--flashed and were gone; for her will
rose up and blurred them into mist; and other words of that true
palimpsest of Sybil Eglington's broken life came instead: "And though he
loves me little, as he loves you little too, yet he is my son, and for
what he is we are both responsible one way or another." As the mother,
so the wife. She said to herself now in sad paraphrase, "And though he
loves me little, yet he is my husband, and for what he is it may be that
I am in some sense responsible." Yet he is my husband! All that it was
came to her; the closed door, the drawn blinds; the intimacy which shut
them away from all the world; the things said which can only be said
without desecration between two honest souls who love each other; and
that sweet isolation which makes marriage a separate world, with its own
sacred revelation. This she had known; this had been; and though the
image of the sacred thing had been defaced, yet the shrine was not
destroyed.

For she believed that each had kept the letter of the law; that, whatever
his faults, he had turned his face to no other woman. If she had not