Mrs. Lawton had sighed, but said nothing. She loved the wide, sunny house, with its colonial mantels and irregular staircase, and secretly she hoped that no one would buy it. Faint hope, for in a week from the day the matter was broached, Adam Lawton announced that the house was sold. A business building had purchased the adjoining property and virtually gave him his price. They could live in an apartment hotel pending the building of the new house. It would give his wife a rest, for he was beginning to notice that she was looking rather worn, and did not attribute it to the real cause or the flight of years, but to some extraneous reason that that most dubious of all acts, “a change,” might overcome. So Mrs. Lawton was spending her second winter at the St. Hilaire, living apart from her own life, as it were. True, she had been listless and not very well of late, but it was more from inertia than any constitutional weakness. No one could expect to keep for thirty years the radiant type of blonde beauty with which Pamela Brooke had glowed at twenty. Mrs. Lawton was still in a sense a beautiful woman, but the vivacity that often outlives freshness of tint and distinctiveness of feature had died first of all. Her charm lay in a certain refinement of outline; colour and features had grown dim as the reflection of a face in a mirror blurred by dust, and her mass of waving golden brown hair, that in its lights and shades had once surpassed even Brooke’s, was of a clear white, as of the days of powder, and gave the delicate features an almost dramatic setting. As Adam Lawton grew more and more absorbed in finance, he was the more exacting of her presence during the evening hours, when, too absorbed to either go out or bid friends come to him, he sat in his simply furnished den, for all luxury stopped at his door, and pored over papers, letters, and maps, scarcely glancing up or speaking to his wife twice in the evening, yet expecting her presence and conscious if she left him for a moment. * * * * * When Brooke had started on this particular winter afternoon for the Parkses’ musicale, in company with her friend, Lucy Dean, Mrs. Lawton had quite decided not to go. Her husband had been unusually silent for the few days past, and had said something about possibly coming home in time to drive up to the new house, which was yet uncompleted, owing to the building strike of the past summer.