Marie-Aimée's ghost-seeing eyes became fixed upon nothingness. She sat so a long time, her chin dropped in dolorous absorption; a figure which struck discomfort in the beholder. Another woman buying music bent over the counter and whispered to the clerk, who whispered back, and both stole glances at the unconscious, rigid, dumpy profile, stamped with tragedy, of the well-known pianiste, whose most intimate sorrow had become town-talk. She went out at last into the hubbub of the streets, which seemed a cruelty of men, under the gorgeous sunset sky, which seemed a cruelty of Heaven's, and, as much as a great heaviness would allow, hurried home and to bed and the dark. It was no use! no use! Though Tony's conduct to her admitted of the face she had put on it to Miss Cheriton, and though the world's jury, upon full evidence, might have acquitted him, he not being the last shade of black, she herself knew, and something of incorruptible justice in the bottom of her heart would not let her blink it, that she had been badly, badly treated. But that was not the most woeful, that she should have been badly treated, or that she must live her days hereafter without him; but that he, Tony, should have been capable of doing this thing to her, to her, who would have shed her blood for him, and he knew it. In the days following, as she went about her crowded occupations, she did not, as she had allowed herself to do before, seek relief in speaking of what weighed upon her heart. But human strength did not suffice to keep the matter out of her face; her cheek was leaden, her eyes were in a fog.