had ended in an unreal romance that was bringing to her, within a day or two, an unreal hero.  She was forced again face to face with that fact that the man who was coming to marry her was, for all practical knowledge that she had of him, a stranger.  In proportion as calamity encompassed her he receded, taking his place once more in that dim world she should never have frequented and in which she had no longer lot nor part.

She should never have frequented it for the simple reason that for all she had brought to it or got from it some one else had to pay.  The knowledge induced a sense of shame which no consciousness of committed crime could have exceeded.  She would have been less humiliated had she plotted and schemed to win flattery and homage for herself than she was in discovering that people had been tricked into giving them spontaneously.  To drop the mask, to tear asunder the robe of pretense, to cry the truth from the housetops, and, like some Scriptural woman taken in adultery, lie down, groaning and stunned, under the pelting of the stones of those who had not sinned, became to her, as the hours dragged on, an atonement more and more imperative.

But the second odd fact she had to contemplate was the difficulty of getting a new mode of life into operation.  Notwithstanding all her eagerness to pay, the days were still passing in gentle routine somewhat quietly because of her father’s indisposition, but with the usual household dignity.  There was a clock-work smoothness about life at Tory Hill, due to the most competent service secured at the greatest expense.  Old servants, and plenty of them, kept the wheels going noiselessly even while they followed with passionate interest the drama being played in the other part of the house.  To break in on the course of their duties, to disturb them, or put a stop to them, was to Olivia like an attempt to counteract the laws that regulate the sunrise.  She knew neither how to set about it nor where to begin.  There was something poignant in the irony of these unobtrusive services from the minute when her maid woke her in the morning till she helped her to change her dress for dinner, and yet there was nothing for it but to go through the customary daily round.  When it became necessary to tell the women that the preparations for the wedding must be stopped and that the invitations to the two big dinners that were to be given in honor of Colonel Ashley had been withdrawn she gathered from small signs—­the feigned stolidity of some of them and the overacted astonishment of others—­that they had probably been even better informed than Drusilla Fane.  After that the food they brought her choked her and the maid’s touch on her person was like fire, while she still found herself obliged to submit to these long-established attentions.