Wilbur Edes sailing across the river had, however, no conception of the change which had begun in his little world.  It was only a shake of the kaleidoscope of an unimportant life, resulting in a different combination of atoms, but to each individual it would be a tremendous event partaking of the nature of a cataclysm.  That morning he had seen upon Margaret’s charming face an expression which made it seem as the face of a stranger.  He tried to dismiss the matter from his mind.  He told himself that it must have been the effect of the light or that she had pinned on her hat at a different angle.  Women are so perplexing, and their attire alters them so strangely.  But Wilbur Edes had reason to be puzzled.  Margaret had looked and really was different.  In a little while she had become practically a different woman.  Of course, she had only developed possibilities which had always been dormant within her, but they had been so dormant, that they had not been to any mortal perception endowed with life.  Hitherto Margaret had walked along the straight and narrow way, sometimes, it is true, jostling circumstances and sometimes being jostled by them, yet keeping to the path.  Now she had turned her feet into that broad way wherein there is room for the utmost self which is in us all.  Henceforth husband and wife would walk apart in a spiritual sense, unless there should come a revolution in the character of the wife, who was the stepper aside.

Margaret seated comfortably on the ferry boat, her little feet crossed so discreetly that only a glimpse of the yellow fluff beneath was visible, was conscious of a not unpleasurable exhilaration.  She might and she might not be about to do something which would place her distinctly outside the pale which had henceforth enclosed her little pleasance of life.  Were she to cross that pale, she felt that it might be distinctly amusing.  Margaret was not a wicked woman, but virtue, not virtue in the ordinary sense of the word, but straight walking ahead according to the ideas of Fairbridge, had come to drive her at times to the verge of madness.  Then, too, there was always that secret terrible self-love and ambition of hers, never satisfied, always defeated by petty weapons.  Margaret, sitting as gracefully as a beautiful cat, on the ferry boat that morning realised the vindictive working of her claws, and her impulse to strike at her odds of life, and she derived therefrom an unholy exhilaration.

She got her taxicab on the other side and leaned back, catching frequent glances of admiration, and rode pleasurably to the regal up-town hotel which was the home of Miss Martha Wallingford, while in the city.  She, upon her arrival, entered the hotel with an air which caused a stir among bell boys.  Then she entered a reception room and sat down, disposing herself with slow grace.  Margaret gazed about her and waited.  There were only three people in the room, one man and two ladies, one quite young—­a