Oswyn viewed her compassionately, while a somewhat bitter smile played about his mouth.

“No, you will go back, Mrs. Lightmark!  Forgive me,” he added, raising his hand, interrupting her, as she seemed on the point of speech.  “I don’t want to intrude on you—­on your thoughts, with advice or consolation.  They are articles I don’t deal in.  Only I will tell you—­I who know—­that in revolt also there is vanity.  You are bruised and broken and disillusioned, and you want to hide away from the world and escape into yourself, or from yourself; it’s all the same.  Ah, Mrs. Lightmark, believe me, in life that is not possible, or where it is most possible is in a crowd.  Go back to your guests; I know, you see, whence you come; take up your part in the play, the masque; be ready with your cues.  It’s all masks and dominoes; what does the form or colour of it matter?  Underneath it all you are yourself, with your beautiful sorrow, your memories, your transcendent happiness—­nothing can touch that; what does it matter?”

“Happiness!” she ejaculated, rather in wonder than in scorn, for in spite of her great weariness she had been struck by the genuine accent struggling through his half ironical speech.

“Most happy,” he said, with a deep inhalation.  “Haven’t you an ideal which life, with its cruelties, its grossness, can never touch?”

Then he added quickly, in words of Philip Rainham, which had flashed with sudden appositeness across his mind.

“Your misery has its compensation; you have been wronged, but you have also been loved.”

“Ah, my friend!” she cried, turning toward the picture with a new and more beautiful illumination in her eyes, “was it for this that you did it?”

Oswyn said nothing, and Eve moved towards the door, discovering for the first time, on her way, the sleeping child.  She stopped for a moment, and the other watched her with breathless curiosity, uncertain how far her knowledge might extend.

And as she stood there, wondering, a great wave of colour suffused her white face; the next moment she was gone, but in the light of that pure blush Oswyn seemed to have discovered that her tragical enlightenment was complete.

When she turned once more into the street, she had already set herself gravely, with a strange and factitious composure, to face her life.  It stretched itself out before her like a great, gray plain, the arid desolation of the road being rendered only more terrible by the flowers with which it would be strewn.  For suddenly, while Oswyn had been speaking, she had recognised that after all she would go back; the other course had been merely the first bitter cry, half hysterical, of her grief.