“I know just how you feel,” she gasped out above the baby’s head.

Lizzie, in some dark hollow of herself, heard the echo of a laugh.  Andora always thought she knew how people felt!

“Tell Marthe to take him with her when she fetches Juliet home from school.”

“Yes, yes.”  Andora gloated over her.  “If you’d only give way, my darling!”

The baby, howling, dived over Andora’s shoulder for the bag.

“Oh, take him!” his mother ordered.

Andora, from the door, cried out:  “I’ll be back at once.  Remember, love, you’re not alone!”

But Lizzie insisted, “Go with them—­I wish you to go with them,” in the tone to which Miss Macy had never learned the answer.

The door closed on her outraged back, and Lizzie stood alone.  She looked about the disordered room, which offered a dreary image of the havoc of her life.  An hour or two ago everything about her had been so exquisitely ordered, without and within; her thoughtsand emotions had lain outspread before her like delicate jewels laid away symmetrically in a collector’s cabinet.  Now they had been tossed down helter-skelter among the rubbish there on the floor, and had themselves turned to rubbish like the rest.  Yes, there lay her life at her feet, among all that tarnished trash.

She knelt and picked up her letters, ten in all, and examined the flaps of the envelops.  Not one had been opened—­not one.  Asshe looked, every word she had written fluttered to life, and every feeling prompting it sent a tremor through her.  With vertiginousspeed and microscopic vision she was reliving that whole period of her life, stripping bare again the black ruin over which the drift of three happy years had fallen.

She laughed at Andora’s notion of a conspiracy—­of the letters having been “kept back.”  She required no extraneous aid in deciphering the mystery:  her three years’ experience of Deering shed on it all the light she needed.  And yet a moment before shehad believed herself to be perfectly happy!  Now it was the worstpart of her anguish that it did not really surprise her.

She knew so well how it must have happened.  The letters hadreached him when he was busy, occupied with something else, and had been put aside to be read at some future time—­a time which nevercame.  Perhaps on his way to America, on the steamer, even, he had met “some one else”—­the “some one” who lurks, veiled and ominous, in the background of every woman’s thoughts about her lover.  Or perhaps he had been merely forgetful.  She had learned from experience that the sensations which he seemed to feel with the most exquisite intensity left no reverberations in his mind—­thathe did not relive either his pleasures or his pains.  She needed no better proof of that than the lightness of his conduct toward hisdaughter.  He seemed to have taken it for granted that Juliet would remain indefinitely with the friends who had received her after her mother’s death, and it was at Lizzie’s suggestion that the littlegirl was brought home and that they had established themselves at Neuilly to be near her school.  But Juliet once with them, he became the model of a tender father, and Lizzie wondered that he had not felt the child’s absence, since he seemed so affectionately aware of her presence.