Gault had lost her, even as he had lost Viola. He had thought of marriage removing her from the close, interested friendliness of the old days, but he had never realized that it would wean her from him with this cold completeness. She wore the semblance of the Letitia of the past, with strange, bright, alien eyes, and a soft hand that held his with the slack, indifferent clasp of polite acquaintance. Women--would he ever understand them? Would any man? What mystery was behind their white foreheads and under their white breasts? A rush of unutterable sadness, of dreary, sick depression, overwhelmed him. He was hardly able to respond intelligently to the conversational inanities of Pearl, who sat beside him. A numbing consciousness of the futility and hopelessness of life invaded him, and with it, in the midst of the noise and glitter of the brilliant scene, a sense of isolation and a yearning for the woman who, in this gay throng, would have felt lonely as he, and have turned to him as her one soul-mate. Suppose to-night she had been waiting for him in the bare parlor down near South Park! A sudden resolve seized upon him. As soon as dinner was over he excused himself to Mrs. Gault and Letitia, hurried on his overcoat, and slipped away. It had been raining all day--the warm, abundant rain of late December. The breath of the night was softly damp, and fragrant with scents from the saturated gardens. The avenue was deserted and noiseless, save for the even rustle of the falling flood, which made the asphalt shine like ice, into which the lamps' reflections stabbed in long, broken poniards. Nobody was abroad. It was Christmas eve. There were wreaths in the lighted windows, and sounds of singing now and then fell upon Gault's ear. He boarded the car which crossed the avenue farther down, and sat in the glare of its lamps, his face fallen into lines of spiritless apathy. When it reached its terminus he alighted. There were life and movement enough here. People were jostling on the sloppy sidewalks; umbrellas struck against umbrellas, sometimes, in an elbow-brushing contact, caught together, and were dragged apart with a spattering of moisture over laughing faces. The rain dripped monotonously down on them, between them, across the glare of windows, over the rheumy halo of lamps, off the cope of cornices and the angles of gutters. The even roar of Market Street was broken into by the deep voices of hilarious men and the shrill notes of women. Raucous laughter was interrupted by the sudden petulant wail of tired children. Over all the light of show-windows poured in a steady glare, unsoftened by the veil of rain. It was reflected from innumerable wet surfaces, uncovered faces that were moist, draperies beaded with drops, bits of sidewalk, pools in little hollows, and the black and gleaming bosses of hundreds of umbrellas.