Fanny winced. It was cruel. But the cruelty was not hers. It was Fate's. She too had hoped for the very marriage her mother had so ardently desired. But Loftus had not cared. Occupied elsewhere he had sailed away. As well then Annandale as another. "You see, you know," she said in a wretched effort at smoothing things over, "he is quite a hero." But this was too much. Mrs. Price shook her head like a battle horse and fairly neighed. "Because he saved your clothes? If it had been your life and you had said 'Thank you' it would have been ample. But your clothes! Not mine; the beast had not sense enough for that, but yours! I do hope you will give that as an excuse to Sylvia!" CHAPTER X A VICTIM Sylvia had gone from Newport. She was then at Lenox. It was there the previous autumn that her interest in Annandale had begun. The interest had so deepened that she gave him her heart. Never before had she given that to anyone. Annandale had taken it and then, one night, he had so bruised it that she thought it broken. He had written that he had not meant to. His letter had been full of regrets, of protestations, of bad grammar. Such things may palliate, but they do not cure. Only time can do that. Time is a strange emollient. In its mysterious potency it softens without our knowledge. Suddenly a whisper, a breeze that passes, shows that it has done its work. With Sylvia time was having its will. Furtively she had found herself wondering, as Annandale had wondered, how it should fare with her, and how with him, could the past be effaced and the old days renewed. But those days were gone, she decided. Though into that decision a doubt would creep, not indeed concerning the departure, but concerning her attitude and the justice of it. Annandale had sinned. He had sinned wantonly, grievously. From an atmosphere of vice--an atmosphere from which, under pain of her displeasure, she had distinctly warned him--he had staggered to her, its pollution about him, reeking with drink, talking abundantly about nothing imaginable, and at her just remonstrance had become instantly irritable, refusing almost to leave the house. So had his condition and the spectacle of it shocked her that, for awhile, memory of him and of it was repellent. In her own eyes she felt degraded. That men drank, she knew. But in her sphere of life they drank either moderately or else in haunts invisible to her. And it was precisely from such a haunt he had come, a shameless haunt, one that sullied her even to know of.