myself," she added, and there was an exquisite relief in turning even for an instant away from the thought of herself. When she reached home luncheon was awaiting her; but after sitting down at the table and unfolding her napkin, a sudden nausea seized her, and she felt that it was impossible to sit there facing the mahogany sideboard, with its gleaming rows of silver, and watch the precise, slow-footed movements of the maid, who served her as she might have served a wooden image. "I took such trouble to train her, and now it makes me sick to look at her," she thought, as she pushed back her chair and fled hastily from the room into Oliver's study across the hall. Here her work-bag lay on the table, and taking it up, she sat down before the fire, and spread out the centrepiece, which she was embroidering, in an intricate and elaborate design, for Lucy's Christmas. It was almost a year now since she had started it, and into the luxuriant sprays and garlands there had passed something of the restless love and yearning which had overflowed from her heart. Usually she was able to work on it in spite of her suffering, for she was one of those whose hands could accomplish mechanically tasks from which her soul had revolted; but to-day even her obedient fingers faltered and refused to keep at their labour. Her eyes, leaving the needle she held, wandered beyond the window to the branches of the young maple tree, which rose, like a pointed flame, toward the cloudless blue of the sky. In the evening, when Susan came in, with a newspaper in her hand, and a passionate sympathy in her face, Virginia was still sitting there, gazing at the dim outline of the tree and the strip of sky which had faded from azure to grey. "Oh, Jinny, my darling, you never told me!" Taking up the piece of embroidery from her lap, Virginia met her friend's tearful caress with a frigid and distant manner. "There was nothing to tell. What do you mean?" she asked. "Is--is it true that Oliver has left you? That--that----" Susan's voice broke, strangled by emotion, but Virginia, without looking up from the rose on which she was working in the firelight, answered quietly: "Yes, it is true. He wants to be free." "But you will not do it, darling? The law is on your side." With her eyes on the needle which she held carefully poised for the next stitch, Virginia hesitated while the muscles of her face quivered for an instant and then grew rigid again. "What good would it do," she asked, "to hold him to me when he wishes to be free?" And then, with one of those flashes of insight which came to her in moments of great emotional stress, she added quietly, "It is not the law, it is life." Putting her arms around her, Susan pressed her to her bosom as she might have pressed a suffering child whom she was powerless to help or even to make understand. "Jinny, Jinny, let me love you," she begged.