“My marriage was a mistake.  I was very unhappy.  I have had a hard life,” said Alice, and her lower lip, as soft as a baby’s, trembled nervously.  How little character there was in her face, how little of anything except that indefinable allurement of sex!

“I know,” responded Corinna consolingly.  She felt so strong beside this helpless, frightened woman that the old ache to comfort, to heal pain, was like a pang in her heart.

“Everything has failed me,” murmured Alice, with the restless volubility of a weak nature.  “I thought there was something that would make up for what I had missed—­something that would help me to live—­but that has failed me like everything else—­”

“Things will fail,” assented Corinna, with sympathy, “if we lean too hard on them.”

A delicate flush had come into Alice’s face, bringing back for a moment her old flower-like loveliness.  Her fine brown hair drooped in a wave on her forehead, and beneath it her violet eyes were deep and wistful.

“What a beautiful room!” she said in a quivering voice.  “And the garden is like one in an old English song.”

“Yes, I hardly know which I love best—­my garden or my shop.”

The words were so far from Corinna’s thoughts that they seemed to drift to her from some distant point in space, out of the world beyond the garden and the black brows of the cedars.  They were as meaningless as the wind that brought them, or the whirring of the white moth at the window.  Beneath her vacant words and expressionless gestures, which were like the words and gestures of an automaton, she was conscious of a profound current of feeling which flowed steadily between Alice Rokeby and herself; and on this current there was borne all the inarticulate burden of womanhood.  “Poor thing, she wants me to help her,” she thought; but aloud she said only:  “The roses are doing so well this year.  They will be the finest I have ever had.”

Suddenly Alice lowered her veil and rose.  “I must go.  It is late,” she said, and held out her hand.  Then, while she stood there, with her hand still outstretched, all that she had left unspoken appeared to rush over her in a torrent, and she asked rapidly, while her lips jerked like the lips of a hurt child, “Is it true, Corinna, that you are going to marry John Benham?”

For an instant Corinna looked at her without speaking.  The sympathy in her heart ceased as quickly as a fountain that is stopped; and she was conscious only of that lifeless chill with which she had entered the room.  Now that the question had come, she knew that she had dreaded it from the first moment her eyes had rested on the face of her visitor, that she had expected it from the instant when she had heard that a woman awaited her in the house.  It was something of which she had been aware, and yet of which she had been scarcely conscious—­as if the knowledge had never penetrated below the surface of her perceptions.  And it would be so easy, she knew, to evade it now as she had evaded it from the beginning, to push to-day into to-morrow for the rest of her life.  Nothing stood in her way; nothing but that deep instinct for truth on which, it seemed to her now, most of her associations with men had been wrecked.  Then, because she was obliged to obey the law of her nature, she answered simply, “Yes, we expect to be married.”