The person Elizabeth seemed to see most clearly was Archdale in that one moment in which all his heart had been revealed.  Yet it seemed to her that it was not of him that she was thinking most but of Katie’s pain and anger.  If she were to be separated from Stephen Archdale forever, what wonder that she was grieved with the woman who had done it?  For Elizabeth knew that though Katie liked admiration, she loved Stephen.  Elizabeth herself saw that he was superior, not only in appearance, but in mind, to any of the suitors with whom she confessed that in event of the worst it was possible that the girl might console herself.

But Elizabeth was by no means so far above thoughts of herself that any other woman’s suffering was bringing to her face the look that came upon it as her pride and her fear forced her away from the belief she had determined to hold, into a horror lest all she dreaded was true, lest she was really the wife of the man who at the very lightest disliked her.  She could not blame him for that, and it would not have been the worst thing, since she cared nothing about him; she had not fotgotten his look of scorn on that day of the wedding, it came back to her often; but what of that, she asked herself, since she returned it?  But to-night there was more than this; to-night his heart had been shown, and Elizabeth had seen how she stood for misery to him, seen, too, another danger which she had never thought of before.  This possibility, remote enough, would not be put out of sight now.  It might happen that if there were proved to have been no marriage between herself and Stephen Archdale, the certainty of this would come too late to save Katie for him.  Elizabeth turned wild at the sense of her own helplessness.  “I am one too many in the world,” she thought; she could not have spoken, all her will was concentrating into action.  Night had overswept her; she forgot everything in her thought for the beings whom she saw were covered by the same cloud.  She was to be always an ugly obstacle to the happiness of Katie and of a man she pitied.  Whichever way she turned it seemed that there was no other chance for her.  She would not go through the world one too many.  On coming into the room she had put back the curtains for more air and had blown out the candles.  She did not light them again; all that she was going to do she could see well enough to do by the stars and the long summer twilight.  She sat down in the armchair beside her table, drew her dressing-case toward her, and opening it, unlocked one compartment with a tiny key found in another.  The package so carefully locked away here was something that Mrs. Eveleigh in one of her nervous moods had given her to keep, lest some accident should happen.  To be sure, she had given it under promise that no one should know of it, for she had used it for only a little while for her complexion, she explained to Elizabeth, and might never want it again.  But, on the other hand, she might.  It had been a good