The eternal mystery to woman is man's desire of her. It transcends her thought, it looms immense, inscrutable, and irresistible before her. She is the everlasting Semele beneath the fiery glory of Zeus. It is decreed that when brought face to face with it (a chord within her being responsive, be it understood), she shall lose all sense of the proportion between it and the infinite passions of the universe. Life resolves itself into an amazement that she, with a whisper, a touch of her hand, can raise a man from hell to heaven. In the piteous, glorious, tragi-comedy of life, which has been played on millions of stages for millions of years, this elemental fact is so commonplace that it escapes our notice. We are apt to judge from externals, from the results of adherence to ethical systems, from social conventions; and when the actions of men and women are not provided for in artificial canons, we are baffled or are shocked by a sense of the immoral, the abnormal, or the preposterous. But men will desire and women will yield till the end of the human race. And Ella yielded. She bound herself to meet him that evening and go with him into the darkness, whithersoever he should lead; and Roderick left the house, holding his head high, exultant in the sense of having conquered destiny. But when he had gone, Ella threw herself face downwards on the couch in all the abandonment of exhaustion. For a while she could not think; she could only be conscious of the flow and ebb, and again the flow and ebb, and once more the flow of emotion, during the past hour. She had entered the room in light-hearted happiness; there had come the shock of an awful dismay. Then she had been lifted in the tide of the man's passion; there had followed the cold numbness of doubt; again passion had swept away reason. Now was reaction. She felt physically prostrated, and her body ached as if it had been beaten. Her eyelids burned. She would have liked to cry miserably, but she could not. She suffered the woman's torment of unshed tears. Suddenly she rose and drew herself together, despising her weakness. She had pledged herself to do a certain thing. It was to be done, and practical commonplaces had to be faced. First was the breaking of the news to Lady Milmo. The girl's heart was smitten with pity for the kindly lady who had entered so wholeheartedly into these wedding preparations. It would be a keen disappointment to countermand the feast, put off the guests, make lame excuses. And that would not be the end. There would be the scandal of her flight, of which Lady Milmo would have to bear the brunt. It was cruel to treat her so. She went to the window and looked out at the sunny houses on the other side of Pont Street; wondered whether they all were cages for women bound as she was in invisible chains. Her course had been marked out with scrupulous exactness; to deviate from it a hair's breadth would be not only breaking a solemn pledge, but perhaps endangering the life or