Dinah sank into a chair and fell to examining the hue and texture of the ribbon, curiosity, for the moment, out-balancing cold repugnance. It was of foreign make, she saw; a relic, doubtless, of those days when two people, _who might have suited each other_, used to meet, to exchange furtive whispers in a Paris salon; a memento sufficiently precious to have survived through a decade of divided years, and to become the object of a keenly contested wager between them now. ‘Tell your husband,’ with fresh purport Linda’s message returned to her, ‘that he has won, and I am bankrupt.’ She put back the enclosures in their cover, not suffering herself to smell the flowers’ languid odour, or look again on the one word whose import her jealousy divined and magnified. Then, just as she had hidden the letter away in a secret drawer of her dressing-case, the first dinner-bell was set ringing, and Dinah bethought her that, if she would carry out Gaston’s parting request, she must go into the dining-room, alone. No further shirking of that ‘alone’ was practicable. On former occasions she had quietly contrived to absent herself from the public table when Gaston dined abroad, pleading headaches for heartaches, preferring tea to food, ringing the changes by which neglected wives, when they have common sense, keep their own sad counsel apart from the world. The time was past for deceits now, either towards herself, or others. Dinner, to-day, like all her future dinners, for twenty or thirty years, say, must, perforce, be eaten without Gaston. To drift--here, in truth, seemed that which lay before her! To drift! At the present moment to speculate on possible effects--to vacillate over a tucker, a locket, the colour of one’s dinner dress. A despairing human soul, perplexed over the rival merits of pink, white, or blue; a soul which, when love shone on it, had less than its feminine share of toilet vanity! As poor Dinah hesitated, her thoughts travelled back, by no road she knew, to Saturday’s rose-show, her first meeting with Rex Basire, her earliest distinct doubt of Gaston’s truthfulness. She decided to put on the black dress she wore that day, to pin a white rose, Gaston’s flower by predilection, in her hair, to wear a silver bracelet, Gaston’s first present after their marriage, on her wrist. How fair, how marvellously fair she was! The fact struck Dinah with a sense of newness as she stood, waiting for the last dinner-bell, before her glass. Surely her looks, joined to such lavish love as she had given, might have contented the heart, the pride of the most exacting husband. If she had only had more mind. There was the flaw, the fatal deficiency to a man with whom mind was all in all, like Gaston Arbuthnot.