the bare legal husk of the marriage contract—­still held her to him.  She had loved him once, but she loved him no longer, and she resolved passionately that she would not allow her life to be spoiled because of a single mistake.  Seven years were lost out of her youth, it was true, but those years had given her her children, and so they were not wasted in spite of the mistakes she had made, of the shame she had suffered.  Judged simply as a machine she was of greater value at twenty-seven than she had been at twenty, and a part of this value lay in her deeper knowledge of life.  She had had her adventure, and she was cured forever of adventurous desires.  Her imagination, as well as her body, was firmer, harder, more disciplined than it had been in her girlhood; and if her vision of the universe was less sympathetic, it was also less sentimental.  The bluest eyes in the world, she told herself sternly, could not trouble her fancy to-day, nor could the wildest romance quicken her pulses.

A wagon, filled with blue and white hyacinths, passed by in the street, and while she watched it, there flashed into her mind, with the swiftness of light, a memory of the evening when she had broken her engagement to Arthur.  All her life he had loved her, and, but for an accident, she might have married him.  If she had not seen George at Florrie’s party—­if she had not seen him under a yellow lantern, with the glow in his eyes, and a dreamy waltz floating from the arbour of roses at the end of the garden—­if this had not happened, she would have married Arthur instead of George, and her whole life would have been different.  Because of a single instant, because of a chance meeting, she had wrecked the happiness of three lives.  Now, when the bloom had dropped from her love, it was impossible for her to gather the withered leaves and bare stems in her hands and find any fragrance about them; it was impossible for her to understand how or why she had followed so fleeting an impulse.  People had told her that love lasted forever, yet she knew that her emotion for George was so utterly dead that there was no warmth left in the ashes.  It had all been so vivid once, and now it was as dull and colourless as the dust drifting after the blue and white hyacinths.

From the trail of dust and the fragrance of the hyacinths, Arthur’s face floated up to her, grave, gentle, and thin-featured, with its look of detached culture, of nameless distinction.  She recalled the colour of his eyes, as clear and cool as running water, his sensitive lips under the thin, brown moustache, and his slender, aristocratic hands, with their touch as soft and as tender as a woman’s.  “He had intellect—­he had culture—­I suppose these are the things that really matter,” she thought, for George, she knew, possessed neither of these qualities.  And, as she remembered Arthur, she was stirred, not by tenderness, but by a passionate gratitude.  He had loved her, and by loving her, he had saved her pride from defeat.  In the hour of her deepest humiliation, she found comfort in the knowledge of his bleeding heart, of his tragic and beautiful loyalty; for though she was strong enough to live without love, she was not strong enough to live with the thought that no man had ever loved her.