A strange new light began to come into Margaret’s soul, and against it her thoughts took on dark and sharply outlined forms like the shadows thrown on a white screen by the stereopticon; she began to understand. Happiness, after all, was a dream, an imagination, a word; it came not from any visible cause, but lay hidden in every man’s heart like hope imprisoned in Pandora’s box. The secret of it came to her at last,--life moved in an orbit; the past held the future, the future the past, the present was but the connecting link in the inexorable circle, it could not be broken while memory existed, while a reckoning was required. She could no more break the links with her past than she could destroy her immortal soul. In her heart a new, secret thought, born of the strange girl’s gratitude, moved her out of herself. She remembered Mrs. Allestree’s words, and her love for Fox suddenly purged itself of its passionate agony, its jealousy, its pain. Like a woman in a dream she found her way at last to the hotel and climbed the stairs. Her face bore too terrible signs of anguish, and she shrank from the elevator and the curious stare of the servants. It was the dinner hour and the corridors were deserted. She went quietly to her own room and did not ring for her maid. She noticed that her evening gown had been put out and the fire tended. Gerty was not there, she would scarcely be there before nine o’clock, and Margaret went to her desk and sat down and began to write in feverish haste; if she delayed, if she stopped to think she might never do it and she was determined. She bent to her task, white lipped and haggard, writing page after page to Rose Temple. She poured out her heart; in righting Fox she scarcely thought of herself, except that she should never see him again, that Rose must and should marry him! For abruptly the divine impulse of self-immolation had been born in the midst of the tumult of her soul; a woman’s heart, like a eucalyptus tree, trembles with the remembrance of anguish and the eternal sacrifice of love.