Margaret folded the letter and looked out across the river.  It was not the same river, but a mystic current shot with moonlight.  The bare willows wove a leafy veil above her head, and beside her she felt the nearness of youth and tempestuous tenderness.  It had all happened just here, on this very seat by the river—­it had come to her, and passed her by, and she had not held out a hand to detain it. . . .

Well!  Was it not, by that very abstention, made more deeply and ineffaceably hers?  She could argue thus while she had thought the episode, on his side, a mere transient effect of propinquity; but now that she knew it had altered the whole course of his life, now that it took on substance and reality, asserted a separate existence outside of her own troubled consciousness—­now it seemed almost cowardly to have missed her share in it.

She walked home in a dream.  Now and then, when she passed an acquaintance, she wondered if the pain and glory were written on her face.  But Mrs. Sperry, who stopped her at the corner of Maverick Street to say a word about the next meeting of the Higher Thought Club, seemed to remark no change in her.

When she reached home Ransom had not yet returned from the office, and she went straight to the library to tidy his writing-table.  It was part of her daily duty to bring order out of the chaos of his papers, and of late she had fastened on such small recurring tasks as some one falling over a precipice might snatch at the weak bushes in its clefts.

When she had sorted the letters she took up some pamphlets and newspapers, glancing over them to see if they were to be kept.  Among the papers was a page torn from a London Times of the previous month.  Her eye ran down its columns and suddenly a paragraph flamed out.

“We are requested to state that the marriage arranged between Mr. Guy Dawnish, son of the late Colonel the Hon. Roderick Dawnish, of Malby, Wilts, and Gwendolen, daughter of Samuel Matcher, Esq. of Armingham Towers, Wilts, will not take place.”

Margaret dropped the paper and sat down, hiding her face against the stained baize of the desk.  She remembered the photograph of the tennis-court at Guise—­she remembered the handsome girl at whom Guy Dawnish looked up, laughing.  A gust of tears shook her, loosening the dry surface of conventional feeling, welling up from unsuspected depths.  She was sorry—­very sorry, yet so glad—­so ineffably, impenitently glad.

V

THERE came a reaction in which she decided to write to him.  She even sketched out a letter of sisterly, almost motherly, remonstrance, in which she reminded him that he “still had all his life before him.”  But she reflected that so, after all, had she; and that seemed to weaken the argument.