Since the “white night” which had turned her hair to lustreless snow, nothing had hurt her so much.  Her coming to the empty house, driven, as she was, by poverty—­entering alone into a tomb of memories and dead happiness,—­had not stabbed so deeply or so surely.  She saw herself first on one peak and then on another, a valley of humiliation and suffering between which it had taken twenty-five years to cross.  From the greatest hurt at the beginning to the greatest hurt—­at the end?  Miss Evelina started from her chair, her hands upon her leaping heart.  The end?  Ah, dear God, no!  There was no end to grief like hers!

Insistently, through her memory, sounded the pipes o’ Pan—­the wild, sweet, tremulous strain which had led her away from the road where she had been splashed with the mud from Anthony Dexter’s carriage wheels.  The man with the red feather in his hat had called her, and she had come.  Now he was digging in her garden, making the desolate place clean, if not cheerful.

Conscious of an unfamiliar detachment, Miss Evelina settled herself to think.  The first hurt and the long pain which followed it, the blurred agony of remembrance when she had come back to the empty house, then the sharp, clean-cut stroke when she stood on the road, her eyes downcast, and heard the wheels rush by, then clear and challenging, the pipes o’ Pan.

“‘There is a divinity that shapes our ends,’” she thought, “’rough-hew them how we may.’” Where had she heard that before?  She remembered, now—­it was a favourite quotation of Anthony Dexter’s.

Her lip curled scornfully.  Was she never to be free from Anthony Dexter?  Was she always to be confronted with his cowardice, his shirking, his spoken and written thoughts?  Was she always to see his face as she had seen it last, his great love for her shining in his eyes for all the world to read?  Was she to see forever his pearl necklace, discoloured, snaky, and cold, as meaningless as the yellow slip of paper that had come with it?

Where was the divinity that had shaped her course hither?  Why had she been driven back to the place of her crucifixion, to stand veiled in the road while he drove by and splashed her with mud from his wheels?

Out in the garden, the Piper still strove with the weeds.  He had the place nearly half cleared now.  The space on the other side of the house was, as yet, untouched, and the trees and shrubbery all needed trimming.  The wall was broken in places, earth had drifted upon it, and grass and weeds had taken root in the crevices.

Upon one side of the house, nearly all of the bare earth had been raked clean.  He was on the western slope, now, where the splendid poppies had once grown.  Pausing in his whistling, the Piper stooped and picked up some small object.  Miss Evelina cowered behind her shielding shutters, for she guessed that he had found the empty vial which had contained laudanum.