It was a bright Sunday afternoon, when, on her way to pay a call in Kensington, she had dismissed her cab at Lancaster Gate and was walking through Kensington Gardens. Half-way a familiar figure met her eye. It was her own maid sitting on a bench with a man by her side. The girl was wearing a cheap long jacket over an elaborate dress, absurdly light for the time of year. It caught Norma's attention, and then suddenly it flashed upon her that it was the dress she had given to be burned months ago. She walked on, aching with a sense of the futility of grandiose determinations. She had consigned the garment stained with Jimmie's blood contemptuously to the flames. It was incongruously whole in Kensington Gardens. She had cast her love for Jimmie out of her heart in the same spirit of comedic tragedy. Forlorn and bedraggled it was still there, mockingly refusing to be reduced to its proper dust and ashes. Her strength had not availed her to cast it out. Her strength was a vain thing. Yet being forlorn and bedraggled the love was as hateful as the unconsumed garment. It haunted her like an unpurged offence. The newspaper details had made it reek disgustfully. At times Connie Deering's half faith filled her with an extravagant hope that these sordid horrors which had sullied the one pure and beautiful thing that had come into her life were nothing but a ghastly mistake; that it was, as Connie suggested, a dark mystery from which if Jimmie chose he could emerge clean. But then her judgment, trained from childhood to look below the surface of even smiling things and find them foul, rebelled. The man had proclaimed himself, written himself down a villain. It was in black and white. And not only a villain--that might be excusable--but a hypocritical canting villain, which was the unforgivable sin. Every woman has a Holy Ghost of sorts within her. Norma did not write to Morland. She dreaded renewal of relations, and yet she had not the courage to cut him finally adrift. The thought of withered spinsterhood beneath her father's roof was a dismaying vision. Marriage was as essential as ever to the scheme of her future. Why not with Morland? Her mother's words, though spoken as with the tongues of asps, were those of wisdom.