the long lines of the rain looking like threads of glass against their light. The force of the storm was augmenting. The drops beat on the top of the carriage with a drumming, pugnacious violence, and now and then dashed across the window. There were already pools in the hollows of the pavement, and from bent gutter-pipes long ribbons of water, torn by the gusts, sprang down on unwary passers-by.
Letitia took her handkerchief and rubbed away the moisture on the pane. She was looking out on the spectacle of the swimming streets with apparent interest. The conversation had not been resumed. She had nothing more to say, and Gault sat back in his corner immersed in silent thought. Once he had asked her if her engagement to Tod was a fully accomplished and recognized fact. To this she had replied that it was not, exactly, as Tod was to receive her final answer on the following Sunday, but that as far as she was concerned it was a settled thing.
Leaning back in the darkened corner, Gault bitterly inveighed against the social system which allows such a mismating; against the narrowing laws of conventionality which had fettered so strong a spirit as Letitia; above all, against that weakness of the woman which makes life alone so impossible to her unsufficing and dependent spirit. What a fate for this
