restless, heaving sea. and beyond the dull gray of the horizon and the
cupped sky.

She turned, slowly, smiling a little. The shrivelled, shrunken old woman
bent her head forward upon her flat breast, thrice.

"_Bien_," she muttered. And that was all.




[Illustration]

CHAPTER EIGHT.

OF CERTAIN GOINGS.


It so happened that, on the winter after Jack Schuyler and Tom Blake
graduated from college, death came to the big houses on the Avenue. Mrs.
John Stuyvesant Schuyler went first; Mrs. Thomas Cathcart Blake went,
almost, with her; for she had been by the bedside of her friend during
all her illness; and her friend, going, had bestowed upon her its
horrible heritage. And so she went, too.

Their going left in the two great houses, monstrous voids that might
never be filled. John Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake loved
their wives; and when a man has loved a woman, and that woman his wife,
as these two had loved, it seems in a way to disrupt the cosmogony of
things. It takes ambition from the brain, and the stamina from the spine;