“Isn’t that like a woman?” he presently demanded of the June heavens.  “To drag something out of a man with inflexibility, monomania and moral grappling-irons, and then not like it!  Oh, very well!  I am disgusted by your sex’s axiomatic variability.  I shall take Harry to his fond mamma at once.”

She did not say anything.  A certain new discovery obsessed her like a piece of piercing music.

Then Rudolph Musgrave gave the tiniest of gestures downward.  “And I have told you this, in chief, because we two remember him.  He wanted you.  He took you.  You are his.  You will always be.  He gave you just a fragment of himself.  That fragment was worth more than everything I had to offer.”

Anne very carefully arranged her roses on the ivy-covered grave.  “I do not know—­meanwhile, I give these to our master.  And my real widowhood begins to-day.”

And as she rose he looked at her across the colorful mound, and smiled, half as with embarrassment.  A lie, he thought, might ameliorate the situation, and he bravely hazarded a prodigious one.  “Is it necessary to tell you that Jack loved you?  And that the others never really counted?”

He rejoiced to see that Anne believed him.  “No,” she assented, “no, not with him.  Oddly enough, I am proud of that, even now.  But—­don’t you see?—­I never loved him.  I was just his priestess—­the priestess of a stucco god!  Otherwise, I would know it wasn’t his fault, but altogether that of—­the others.”

He grimaced and gave a bantering flirt of his head.  He said, with quizzing eyes: 

“Would it do any good to quote Lombroso, and Maudsley, and Gall, and Krafft-Ebing, and Flechsig, and so on? and to tell you that the excessive use of one brain faculty must necessarily cause a lack of nutriment to all the other brain-cells?  It would be rather up-to-date.  There is a deal I could tell you also as to what poisonous blood he inherited; but to do this I have not the right.”  And then Rudolph Musgrave said in all sincerity:  “’A wild, impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody dwelling in the heart of it.’”

She had put aside alike the drolling and the palliative suggestion, like flimsy veils.  “I think it wouldn’t do any good whatever.  When growing things are broken by the whirlwind, they don’t, as a rule, discuss the theory of air-currents as a consolation.  Men such as he was take what they desire.  It isn’t fair—­to us others.  But it’s true, for all that—­”

Their eyes met warily; and for no reason which they shared in common they smiled together.

“Poor little Lady of Shalott,” said Rudolph Musgrave, “the mirror is cracked from side to side, isn’t it?  I am sorry.  For life is not so easily disposed of.  And there is only life to look at now, and life is a bewilderingly complex business, you will find, because the laws of it are so childishly simple—­and implacable.  And one of these laws seems to be that in our little planet, might makes right—­”