exuberant youth which, at bottom, had been the source of all her success. It had slipped away somehow, in the night, without her knowing it. She was still strong (she knew that well enough), still filled with energy, but something was gone, a faint rosy mist perhaps, which had covered all life, even in the bitterest moments, with a glow that touched everything with a glamorous unreality, which made each new turning seem a wild adventure. It was gone; life was slipping past. Here she sat, a woman little past thirty, and what had she gained in exchange? Fame, perhaps? And wealth, which lay just around the next corner? Something had escaped her; something which in her mind was associated dimly with Lily and the memory of the pavilion silvered by the moon.
She stirred suddenly. "I must go. My mother and Miss Ogilvie are waiting at the Ritz."
She rose and Thérèse pulled herself with an heroic effort from the depths of her chair. Together they walked through the bleak, shadowy hall and at the door Mrs. Callendar said, "You will come to dinner with me some night . . . yes? I will ring you up to-morrow."
And as Ellen moved away down the steps, she added, "Remember, you must not overwork. . . . You must care for yourself. You are not as young as you were once."
It was that final speech You are not as young as you were once which, like a barbed arrow, remained in her mind and rankled there as she drove in the Callendar motor through the streets to the Ritz where she found her mother and Miss Ogilvie sitting sleepily with an air of disapproval while Sanson and Rebecca and Uncle Raoul drank champagne and labored to be gay in celebration of the triumph.
It was about this hour that the amorous wailing of the tom-cat died forever upon the ears of Mr. Wyck.
In the morning the newspapers printed, in the column devoted to murders, suicides and crimes of violence, a single paragraph
