"It's been so hard for me to write things this time," she lamented. "I feel that it's all going to fall flat. But whatever happens," and her eyes were eloquent with something more than gratitude, "I've had the happiest morning of my life." And she closed the door quietly, and left him there. As he stepped out into the hard light of noonday, once more he felt that vague impression of unrest, that reaction of despondency which he had often enough felt when emerging from the music and romance of a theater and passing out into the garish lights and noises of a workaday world. He, too, felt that his day was over and done. CHAPTER VIII LIFE'S IRON CROWN Deep in its ancient center we Had dreamed its aging heart should be; Yet there, where should have slept its soul, Was only darkness and a hollowed bole! JOHN HARTLEY, "The Old Yew at Iffley." Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.--"The Silver Poppy." When Hartley turned the last page of The Silver Poppy he closed the book meditatively but amazed. In it he had found the golden key to a long-closed mystery. In it he had seen revealed the great heart and mind of a misunderstood woman. He had caught the substance where before he had beheld only the shadow. It was as if from the shuttered windows of an empty house he had heard unexpected music. He had found the deeper and truer woman. All suspicion and dread of some elusive element he had never been able to fathom in Cordelia Vaughan at one stroke vanished away. Thereafter he was determined to read her and accept her as she lay revealed in the pages before him. For he saw that into those pages had escaped some mellower, softer, profounder part of her, a part which when face to face with her at different times he had groped for in vain. For he could see, as plain as his hand, that The Silver Poppy was not a book of the moment. It had in it elements of greatness that startled him, and left him gasping. There was a whimsical turn to its tendernesses, a quiet reserve to its humor and pathos so adroitly blended, a quaintness and ingenuous freshness of touch, and, above all, an impersonal, judicial aloofness from life that spoke, at first sight, more of the hand of a man than that of a woman, and a woman still in her youth--at any rate, in her youth as an artist and a creator.