She came back filled with such thoughts as might well strike the heart of a woman about to do the thing she had decreed.  The refreshment bar was open now, and she went to it, and bought a cup of coffee and some bread and butter.  Then she took her ticket, not to Bryngelly or to Coed, but to the station on this side of Bryngelly, and three miles from it.  She would run less risk of being noticed there.  The train was shunted up; she took her seat in it.  Just as it was starting, an early newspaper boy came along, yawning.  Beatrice bought a copy of the Standard, out of the one and threepence that was left of her money, and opened it at the sheet containing the leading articles.  The first one began, “The most powerful, closely reasoned, and eloquent speech made last night by Mr. Bingham, the Member for Pillham, will, we feel certain, produce as great an effect on the country as it did in the House of Commons.  We welcome it, not only on account of its value as a contribution to the polemics of the Irish Question, but as a positive proof of what has already been suspected, that the Unionist party has in Mr. Bingham a young statesman of a very high order indeed, and one whom remarkable and rapid success at the Bar has not hampered, as is too often the case, in the larger and less technical field of politics.”

And so on.  Beatrice put the paper down with a smile of triumph.  Geoffrey’s success was splendid and unquestioned.  Nothing could stop him now.  During all the long journey she pleased her imagination by conjuring up picture after picture of that great future of his, in which she would have no share.  And yet he would not forget her; she was sure of this.  Her shadow would go with him from year to year, even to the end, and at times he might think how proud she would have been could she be present to record his triumphs.  Alas! she did not remember that when all is lost which can make life beautiful, when the sun has set, and the spirit gone out of the day, the poor garish lights of our little victories can but ill atone for the glories that have been.  Happiness and content are frail plants which can only flourish under fair conditions if at all.  Certainly they will not thrive beneath the gloom and shadow of a pall, and when the heart is dead no triumphs, however splendid, and no rewards, however great, can compensate for an utter and irredeemable loss.  She never guessed, poor girl, that time upon time, in the decades to be, Geoffrey would gladly have laid his honours down in payment for one year of her dear and unforgotten presence.  She was too unselfish; she did not think that a man could thus prize a woman’s love, and took it for an axiom that to succeed in life was his one real object—­a thing to which so divine a gift as she had given Geoffrey is as nothing.  It was therefore this Juggernaut of her lover’s career that Beatrice would cast down her life, little knowing that thereby she must turn the worldly and temporal success, which he already held so cheap, to bitterness and ashes.