“Oh, dear no! that’s not my way.  But I’m going to respect her very much.  I think we have both rather shunned her lately, and I did feel sure at first that you meant to be very kind to her, Maggie.”

Miss Oliphant yawned.  It was her way to get over emotion very quickly.  A moment before her face had been all eloquent with feeling; now its expression was distinctly bored, and her lazy eyes were not even open to their full extent.

“Perhaps I found her stupid,” she said, “and so for that reason dropped her.  Perhaps I would have continued to be kind if she had reciprocated attentions, but she did not.  I am glad now, very glad, that we are unlikely to be friends, for, after what you have just told me, I should probably find her insupportable.  Are you going, Nancy?”

“Yes, I promised to have cocoa with Annie Day.  I had almost forgotten.  Good night, Maggie.”

Nancy shut the door softly behind her, and Maggie closed her eyes for a moment with a sigh of relief.

“It’s nice to be alone,” she said softly under her breath, “it’s nice and yet it isn’t nice.  Nancy irritated me dreadfully this evening.  I don’t like stories about good people.  I don’t wish to think about good people.  I am determined that I will not allow my thoughts to dwell on that unpleasant Priscilla Peel, and her pathetic poverty, and her burst of heroics.  It is too trying to hear footsteps in that room.  No, I will not think of that room nor of its inmate.  Now, if I could only go to sleep!”

Maggie curled herself up in her luxurious chair, arranged a soft pillow under her head and shut her eyes.  In this attitude she made a charming picture:  her thick black lashes lay heavily on her pale cheeks; her red lips were slightly parted; her breathing came quietly.  By and by repose took the place of tension—­ her face looked as if it were cut out of marble.  The excitement and unrest, which her words had betrayed, vanished utterly; her features were beautiful, but almost expressionless.

This lasted for a short time, perhaps ten minutes; then a trivial circumstance, the falling of a coal in the grate, disturbed the light slumber of the sleeper.  Maggie stirred restlessly and turned her head.  She was not awake, but she was dreaming.  A faint rose tint visited each cheek, and she clenched one hand, then moved it, and laid it over the other.  Presently tears stole from under the black eyelashes and rolled down her cheeks.  She opened her eyes wide; she was awake again; unutterable regret, remorse, which might never be quieted, filled her face.

Maggie rose from her chair, and, going across the room, sat down at her bureau.  She turned a shaded lamp, so that the light might fall upon the pages of a book she was studying, and, pushing her hands through her thick hair, she began to read a passage from the splendid Prometheus Vinctus of AEschylus: 

“O divine ether, O swift-winged winds!”