to Eleanor merely the woman to whom Jacky belonged.  Looking back on those months that followed her discovery of Lily, and contrasting the agony she had felt then with her despair about Edith now, she was faintly surprised at the difference in her pain.  This was probably because faithlessness of the body is not so deadly an insult to Love as faithlessness of the mind.  But Eleanor did not, of course, make any such explanation.  She just said to herself that Maurice had been a boy when he had been untrue to her, and she herself had been, in some ways, to blame; and he had confessed, and been forgiven.  So Lily was now of no consequence—­except as she interfered with Eleanor’s passionate wish to have Jacky.  So she did not hate Lily, or fear her (though she was humiliated at that car fare!).  But she did hate Edith, and fear of her was agony....  So she would, somehow, keep her out of the house!

Just as she was getting into bed, she wiped her eyes, then cringed at a gust of perfumery—­and realized that she had brought Lily’s handkerchief back with her!  It was a last abasement:  the woman’s horrible handkerchief.  She burst into hysterical weeping....  The next morning, when she came down to breakfast, her face was haggard with those ravaging tears, and with the fatigue of hating.  Even before she had her coffee, she burned the scented scrap of machine-embroidered linen, pressing it down between the logs in the library fireplace; but she could not burn her hate; it burned her!

She was so worn out that when, a little before luncheon, Edith suddenly came breezily in, she was, at first, too confused to know what to say to her....  It was an incredibly mild day; on the shady side of the back yard there was still a sooty heap of melting snow, but the sky was turquoise, soaring without a cloud and brimmed with light, so that the shadows of the bare branches of the poplar, clear-cut like jet, crisscrossed on the brick path; in the border, the brown fangs of the tulips had bitten up through the wet earth, and two militant crocuses had raised their tight-furled purple standards.  Eleanor, tempted by the sunshine, had come here, muffled up in an elderly white shawl, to sit by the little painted table—­built so long ago for Edith’s pleasure!  She had put old Bingo’s basket in the sun, and stroked him gently; he was very helpless now, and ate nothing except from her hands.

“Poor little Bingo!” Eleanor said; “dear little Bingo!” Bingo growled, and Eleanor looked up to see why—­Edith was on the iron veranda.

“Hullo!” Edith said, gayly; “isn’t it a wonderful day?  I just ran in—­” She came down the twisted stairway and, unasked and smiling, sat down at the table.  “Bingo!  Don’t you know your friends?  One would think I was a burglar!  Oh, Eleanor, the tulips are up!  Do you remember when Maurice and I planted them?”

Eleanor’s throat tightened.  She made some gasping assent.

“I came ’round,” Edith said—­her frank eyes looked straight into Eleanor’s eyes, dark and agonized—­“I ran in, because I’m afraid you thought, yesterday, that I wanted to quarter myself on you?  And I just wanted to say, don’t give it a thought!  I perfectly understand that sometimes it’s inconvenient to have company, and—­”