Mrs. Payne laughed her hard little mirthless laugh, and stretched out her withered hand with a melodramatic gesture.  “But I was never a fool, my dear,” was her retort, “and there are few women of whom it can be said with truth that they were never at any time, from the beginning to the end of their career, a fool.  Nobody is a fool always, but there are very few people who escape it throughout their lives.”

“Oh, I was,” sighed Angela submissively, “I know it, but I was punished.”

“It is the one thing for which we can count quite certainly upon being punished in this life,” remarked Mrs. Payne, with a kind of moral satisfaction, as of one who was ranged upon the side of worldliness if not of righteousness.  “Other sins are for eternity, I suppose, but I have never yet seen a fool escape the deserts of his folly.  It is the one reason which has always made me believe so firmly in an overruling Providence.  Are you going out, my child?” she asked, as Laura rose.

“I am stifling for want of air,” replied the girl, shrinking away from the unnatural flash of her aunt’s eyes.  “I’ll read to aunt Angela when I come in, but just now I must get out.”  Then as Mrs. Payne still sought to detain her, she broke away and ran rapidly down into the street.

But she was no sooner out of doors than it seemed to her that she ought to have stayed in her room—­that the minutes would have passed more swiftly in unbroken quiet.  Her senses were absorbed in the single desire to have the day over—­to begin to-morrow; and it seemed to her that when once the night was gone, she would be able to collect her thoughts with clearness, that the morning would bring some lucid explanation of the disturbance that she felt to-day.  Then it occurred to her that she would follow Gerty’s example and seek a distraction in the shops, and she took a cab and drove to her milliner’s, where she tried on a number of absurdly impossible hats.  She bought one at last, to realise immediately as she left the shop that she would never persuade herself to wear it because she felt that it gave her an air of Gerty’s “smartness” which sat like an impertinence upon her own individual charm.  Glancing at her watch she found that only two hours had gone since she left the house, and turning up the street she walked on with a step which seemed striving to match in energy her rapid thoughts.

“You have effaced every other impression of my life,” he had said to her yesterday; and as she repeated the words she remembered the quiver of his mouth under his short brown moustache, the playful irony of the smile that had met her own.  Had he meant more or less than the spoken phrase?  Was the strength of his handclasp sincere?  Or was the caressing sound of his voice a lie, as Gerty believed?  Was he, in truth, fighting under all the shams of life for the liberation of his soul? or was there only the emptiness of sense within him, after all?  She felt his burning look again, and