had been angry and jealous at his deception, and bitter at Madame Nozières for having caused his death. She had thought, "If he had not been going to meet her, he would not have been killed."
But she knew better now. She had been a fool. It was absurd and monstrous that any one, even herself, should fancy he could bend fate to his own ends. It was too imbecile, too senseless. No, she was wiser now. She was not the headlong fool she had once been. In the face of all that had happened in this one terrible night, she was utterly humbled. Who was she to question the behavior of this brother who lay dead under the gilded swans? Who was she, a cold, hard woman, to question a love of which she knew nothing? And what did it matter now? She was glad suddenly, with a strange, wild happiness, that he had known this Madame Nozières. Her blondeness, her beauty, her fine clothes, her spirit . . . all these things had made him happy, on how many leaves in Paris?
What did it matter now? One lived but an instant, frantically, and time rushed on and on. . . .
But he was right. Their mother must never know the truth.
She thought too of Callendar, for he was with her all the time, almost as if he had never gone away. The old foreboding returned to her—that phrase out of Lily's letter—And then he rode away into the darkness. I am certain he is dead. He had gone away and she did not know where. Perhaps she had been wrong to refuse him, cruel to have denied him the happiness that Madame Nozières had given to Fergus. Things mattered so little now. It seemed to her that she stood somewhere on a lofty pinnacle, looking down on the spectacle . . . a pitiful spectacle, so full of "sound and fury, signifying nothing." The old quotation came back to her out of the dim memories of the past when she had hated Shakespeare with an intense passion. "Sound and fury, signifying nothing." That was it. It was far better to be like her mother, the invincible Hattie, who never mounted to the
