The _segreto_ indeed! The secret of happiness was remoter now than when, under the teaching of the ex-first lady, she had first attacked the score. But her voice had improved. It was fuller, more resonant and ample. Marie, too, had improved. In face and figure beauty had developed. Her manner was securer, her eyes more grave, her smile less frequent. The bud had blossomed. In the process a year had gone. From high Norman downs she had watched the summer pass. Autumn had met her in the Elysian Fields. There the wolfish winter had approached. At the first bite there had been a flight to Havre, the return to New York. Now it was spring again. Through the open windows of the Arundel came the city's hum and with it the subtleties and enticements of May. A year had gone. But there are years that count double. There are others so vast that in them you may have evolved a world, seen it glow and subside. The solitudes of space appal. The solitudes of the heart may be as endless as they. In those where Marie loitered a world had had its birth and subsidence, a world with gem-like hopes for stars, a world lighted by a sun so eager that its rays had made her blind. There had been aspirations, gorgeous and tangental as comets are. There had been the colorless ether of which dreams are made. For cosmic matter there was love. A year had gone. In it, these wonders had formed and fled. Marie got from the piano. It had no secret to tell. But there was another which the year had revealed, a secret which, at first opaque and obscure, little by little had taken shape and changed from an impossibility into a monstrous fact. Marie had begun by disavowing it. She had disowned it, would have none of it. But disavowals cease. In certain conditions we get used to monsters. The soul makes itself at home with what it must. The monster to which Marie was accustoming herself was the knowledge that her lover had lied. In departing with him from the den of the ex-first lady it was not merely with faith and trust, but with absolute certainty that marriage, if delayed, was only postponed; that a week, a month at the furthest, would see her his wife. On the way she had stopped and wired to Gay street, telling her father not to worry, that she had gone to be married, that she would write to him soon.