A remote disdainful pity for me gathered in her dim smile; then she
spoke in a voice that I hear at this hour: "It's my LIFE!" As I
stood at the door she added: "You've insulted him!"

"Do you mean Vereker?"

"I mean the Dead!"

I recognised when I reached the street the justice of her charge.
Yes, it was her life--I recognised that too; but her life none the
less made room with the lapse of time for another interest. A year
and a half after Corvick's death she published in a single volume
her second novel, "Overmastered," which I pounced on in the hope of
finding in it some tell-tale echo or some peeping face. All I
found was a much better book than her younger performance, showing
I thought the better company she had kept. As a tissue tolerably
intricate it was a carpet with a figure of its own; but the figure
was not the figure I was looking for. On sending a review of it to
The Middle I was surprised to learn from the office that a notice
was already in type. When the paper came out I had no hesitation
in attributing this article, which I thought rather vulgarly
overdone, to Drayton Deane, who in the old days had been something
of a friend of Corvick's, yet had only within a few weeks made the
acquaintance of his widow. I had had an early copy of the book,
but Deane had evidently had an earlier. He lacked all the same the
light hand with which Corvick had gilded the gingerbread--he laid
on the tinsel in splotches.