into such a grubby old woman. I shall care for myself to the very end. I shall die, handsomely dressed, with my hair in perfect order and with my corsets on. She is a Levantine after all. She might be an old woman with a fruit stand in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge."
(Thérèse with the glitter in her dark almond eyes, poking about in a reticule that contained a vast fortune in securities.)
Callendar walked with her through the comic opera hallway and out to her motor where, with a great courtliness, he saw her step in and closed the door after her.
"Good-by," he murmured quietly. "If there is anything you want, let me know."
So although for a time it had seemed that all the cards were turning up for her, she had in the end lost her game of patience. She had lost it, she reflected, to Ellen Tolliver whom she had neglected to respect sufficiently—a crude, uncivilized mountebank brought in to amuse the guests in the house on Murray Hill. What was the secret that lay behind all the mystery?
As the motor drove away, it occurred to her that the parting had been like one between strangers. She had been to them, then, nothing at all; she might have been a clerk employed in some branch of the Leopopulos bank, a creature who had been of use to them and whom they sent away when her usefulness was ended, willing to pension her if she desired it, like an old family employee. More than twelve years she had given to them . . . years in which she tried, desperately, heart-breakingly to establish some bond that was too strong to be broken in this cold, matter-of-fact fashion. More than twelve years she had struggled against something which was stronger, far stronger, than her own will and self-possession. And now they sent her away without more than a formal good-by. . . . Thérèse had her fortune still, vaster than it had ever been. Nothing else mattered.
She took out the mirror from the side of her motor and fell to examining her face. Here at least the twelve years had not
