of the Superba Electrical Company. There were members of the latter organization who thought it queer that their vice president attended the annual ball, held that year in a Brooklyn Hotel, as he had always done, alone, without his wife. It happened that she played that night in the solid house on Murray Hill.
And what then of Ellen herself? She was not, surely, unconscious of all that was happening so slowly, so imperceptibly about her. It is true that she was one of those who are born to success, one for whom the past does not exist and the present has reality only in so far as it provides a step into the future. Indeed, during those years in the city, even the Town itself became a very distant and shadowy memory. She was concerned, desperately, with what lay before her, confused perhaps by a sense of imminent disaster so vague that it could have for her no real meaning or significance.
But of course she never spoke of these things to her husband, perhaps because she was conscious that he might not understand them. At times the old pity for him, the same pity which had seized her so unaccountably upon the night of their flight, overwhelmed her, and at such moments it was her habit to be tender with him in a fashion that sent him into extravagant flights of happiness. But these moments became, after a while, conscious things on the part of Ellen so that presently she used them cheaply to quiet his unhappiness as one might use a gaudy stick of candy to quiet an unhappy child. Such little things made him happy.
Sometimes in the night she would lie in one of the green beds ornamented with garlands of salmon pink roses, listening to the sounds of the city that lay far beneath them . . . the distant rumble which rose and mingled somehow with the glow of light that filled all the dome of the sky, a rumble pierced sharply by the sudden shrill cry of a city child playing late in the streets, or the faint clop! clop! of hoofs upon asphalt blurred now and
