transparent in their fineness—­that he looked through them to the nervous animation confined and struggling in her fragile body.  The same animation throbbed like a pulse in her emaciated bosom, which only the extreme smallness of her bones kept still lovely in its low-cut evening gown.  She was devoured, consumed by the agony of restlessness which shook through her, directing and controlling her slender judgment like a perpetual and imperfectly subdued convulsion of passion.

For an instant he looked at her in attentive silence, then, as her fingers wrestled uncertainly with the cords of her evening wrap, he rose from his chair and bent forward to assist her.

“It’s in a hard knot,” she said irritably.  “I can’t undo it.”

While he released the fastening and drew back his glance fell upon the little bluish hollows in her temples, over which the light curls were skilfully arranged, and as he realised fully her wasted physical resources, it seemed to him that an allusion to anything so sordid as a mere financial difficulty would sound not only trivial but positively indecorous as well.  With a whimsical trick of memory he recalled abruptly a man under sentence of death in a Western gaol who had received the night before his execution a bill for a dozen bottles of champagne.  Connie’s extravagance appeared to him suddenly but a kind of moral champagne—­the particular hasheesh that she had chosen from unhappy consciousness.  To live at all one must live with a dream, he knew, and to his present flashing vision it seemed that Connie’s ecstasy of possession and his own ecstasy of desire served a like end when they transfigured for a little while the brutal actuality from which there was no escape except by the way of a man’s own soul.

“You’re ill,” he said at last in a compassionate voice, “and there’s nothing for you but to get out of New York as soon as possible.”

She looked disconcerted, almost incensed, by the suggestion.

“You can’t send me to Florida,” she returned, “and that’s where everybody goes at this season.”

A trembling like that of faintness which is fought off by an effort of will ran over her, and he watched the pale, unsteady quiver of her eyelids.

“I will send you there—­I’ll send you anywhere,” he said, “if you will promise me—­”

The words were hard to come, and while he stumbled over them she looked up with a startled exclamation.  Her glance travelling to his face, swept over the desk beside which he stood and was arrested by the pile of unpaid bills, which he had pushed, as he spoke, further away from the lamp light.  A hot, angry flush overspread her face, and she made a nervous movement that brought her to her feet with a spring.

“You had no right to look at them,” she burst out sharply, “they are all wrong.  Half of them were not meant for me.”

The lie was so foolish, so ineffectual and without excuse, that he flinched and turned his eyes away—­for the shame of it seemed to belong less to her than to himself.  At the instant he was conscious of a stinging sensation in his veins as of a man who realises for the first time that he has fallen into dishonour.