“There is the mark of the seal they call the signet of Solomon,” she mumbled through the dark to the chandelier. “There are to will and to have your will. There are your social ideas, your excesses, your pleasures that end in death----” Who was it had reminded her of Maupassant not so very long ago? Oh, yes.... That night.... What, indeed, was folly but “a riotous expenditure of will”?... He had not seemed a man to shirk the obligations of his folly--John Cabot--that night. Yet he had not come.... So tender he had seemed in his madness for her; so willing to deny himself; so determined to consider her. He had made her realize the happiness which she and Jack had tried to learn from a bird.... Still, where now--happiness?... And God--where was God? Who was bending over her?... Amor--could that be the gallant love-lad, so broken and so gaunt? Had he come to mock her?... And was it Innocentia clinging, peaked and weeping, to his hand? Sorry comforters, the two. Their visit distressed her more than the nauseous fumes from the jets. There were Vincent Seff and Mary Hutton, now. Why were they still together?... Strange that whichever died first, the other would be there, attentive to the end lest the fear of God overcome the fear of man in a death-bed repentance.... They could be sure of each other’s company to the end.... Hate, then, bound people closer than love.... Love? How lonely was love! “I never--knew God, but I knew--you. Why--_why_ hast thou--forsaken--me?” The gasp was wrung from her stress of body and soul. In the darkness and the aloneness it quavered heartbrokenly upward with her thought of John Cabot. Then she remembered the lady she had admired in the railway station, long, long ago--the lady who had sneezed. She hadn’t made the usual fuss about it; had just leaned out and done it, neatly and composedly.... What was human life but a sneeze? Birth was the warning; youth the preparation; life the sniffing and death the wiping of eyes. After death perhaps one settled back into composure.... The lady had proved a good example in so many crises of her life. It was well to have remembered her in death.... She must make no fuss; must do it neatly and composedly. She threw back her head; set her lips hard; breathed deep and long ... deep and long ... deep and long.... CHAPTER XXII “_A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she, being with child, cried, travailing in birth and pained to be delivered._”