Hen, taken quite by surprise, turned on her a somewhat misty gaze.  She answered that Cally was a darling goose; with other things solacing and sweet.  And then the two cousins were parting, the one to her typewriter, the other to her ease:  but both feeling that a new tie bound them which would not loosen soon.

The car started from Saltman’s door, and Cally glanced at her watch:  it was just three o’clock.  Probably at this moment Dr. Vivian and papa were shaking hands in the office at the Works.  Why, oh, why, hadn’t she said that she would go, too, as she had so much wanted to do?  Surely she could not have harmed that meeting; she might even have helped a little.

About her were the bustle and clangor of busy Centre Street.  People hurrying upon a thousand errands, each intent upon his own business, under the last wrapping each soul alone in the crowded world.  And no one knew of his brother’s high adventures.  Men walked brushing elbows with angels, and unaware....

She had had a little sister named Rosemary, two years older than she, and very lovely in the little picture of her that papa always carried in the locket on his watch-chain.  Often Cally had wished for her sister; never so much as through this day.  There was one, she liked to think, whom she could have talked her heart out to, sure that she would understand all, share all.  But Rosemary had been dead these twenty years....

“Drive me a little, William, please....  For half an hour, and then home....”

The car went far over familiar streets that she had first seen from a perambulator.  She sat almost motionless, the tangible world faded out.  It was good to be alone; this was a solitude peopled with fancies.  Her mind dreamed back over the long strange year, while her steadfast face was shining toward the Future.

* * * * *

Strange enough it seemed now; but till the other day Hugo and Dr. Vivian had hardly once met in the thoughts of Cally Heth.  They had hardly met in life, never exchanged a word since the night in the summer-house:  so she, untrained to discernment, had supposed that they had nothing to do with each other.  Now, in the last few days, it had come to seem that these two had, in her, been pitted against each other from the beginning.

Forces not of her making had cut and patterned her life; and she, driven on by feelings which she herself had hardly understood, had crumpled up that pattern and seized the shears of destiny in her own hand.  The groove she had been set and clamped so fast into ran straight as a string into Hugo Canning’s arms; but she had broken out of her groove, and Hugo was gone, to cross her path no more.  And her mother thought, and Hugo had said almost with his parting breath, that she had been driven to these madnesses by mere foolish femininisms, new little ideas picked up from Cooneys or elsewhere.