Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, on her way down town, had stolen another glimpse at her own disturbed face. The _crise des nerfs_ had clearly brought out to her the presaged passing of her beauty. The little hand glass of the brougham told her, with brutal abruptness, that the face she was gravely studying must pale before the moonlight radiance of Alida VanSittart. Face to face with her own sorrow, she saw the truth at last. Was it envy of the nymph-like girl or a dull hatred of Hathorn, for his cold ingratitude, which racked her heart? “Perhaps, if I had told him all,” she murmured, “I will find out the lost link of my life yet, and there must be a man somewhere who would prove worthy of a woman’s whole confidence. “One who could wander in le Jardin Secret, by my side!” As she studied her own face, with a needless self-deprecation, there came back to her the handsome Western stranger. “Perhaps,” she dreamily said, as her mind wandered away to the great dim Sierras, “uplifting their minarets of snow,” “he may have caught their majestic secret of truth and lofty freedom.” And—she, too, drifted on to a cross-road of life. Elaine Willoughby had finished her inspection of the counterfeit presentment afforded by the little mirror. Though matters of both head and heart claimed all the exercise of her mental powers on this morning, she was lost in a vexing comparison of her own personal charms with those of Alida VanSittart. The lady had never fathomed the reason why the wise Thales had formulated his priceless proverb of three words into the cramped diction, “Man! Know Thyself!” The antique sage wisely refrained from saying, “Woman! Know Thyself!” for, far beyond the clouds wrapping the misty ruins of Greece, Rome and the Nile, the woman of yesterday never had been the woman of to-day, nor her chameleon substitute of to-morrow. The only thing unvarying in womanhood, is its infinite emotional variety. Not one in a million of that charming sex has ever mastered the secret of their strange enigmas of varying loves, and the one only anchored feeling of motherhood. The divine Shakespeare’s words, “’Tis brief! Aye—as woman’s love!” are supplemented by the great-hearted Mrs. Browning’s feminine lines, “Yes! I answered you last night. No! this morning, sir, I say!” Elaine Willoughby did not know herself. She resolutely put away the reason why she ignored all the hawk-eyed young Gibson beauties of Irvington, Tarrytown, and Ardsley, to nourish a resentment alone against that slim Diana, Alida VanSittart. Woman of the world, throned upon a golden pedestal of wealth—mistress of secrets that would shake the financial world—she had also enjoyed the homage of men long enough to know every one of her own good points. There had been hours of triumph, too. For, after all, a woman’s heart beat behind the silken armor of her Worth robes. Still in the bloom of a meridian beauty, no one in Gotham knew but Hiram Endicott that her years were thirty-seven.