something far more, a part of all her inner longing. He had put her
down and was looking away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding
lip.

She saw him that way in her dreams--in the court under the massive
somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her
that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a
darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never
a sound sleeping in the prison of winter.




XVII


Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following
May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the
entire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous
cheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and
banked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches,
healths and tears. Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all
the loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of her
isolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a very
different wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's.

After dinner--an occasion, with Pansy absent, where Mr. Moses
Feldt's tears persisted in flowing--she had strayed into the formal
chamber across from the dining-room and leaned out of a window,
gazing into the darkening court. Directly below was where Pleydon