Kate stood before a teetering knobless bureau reflecting upon the singular coincidence which should place her in the same room for her second social affair in the Prouty House as that to which she had been assigned upon her first. The bureau had been new then and, to her inexperienced eyes, had looked the acme of luxurious magnificence. She recalled as vividly as though the lapse of time consisted of days, not years, the round eager face, that had looked out of the glass.
She had been only seventeen--that other girl--and every emotion that she felt was to be read in her expressive face and in her candid eyes. It was different--the face of this woman of twenty-eight who calmly regarded Kate.
She turned her head and took in the room with a sweeping glance.
It was there, in the middle of the floor, that she had torn off and flung her wreath; it was in the corner over there that she had thrown her bunting dress. On the spot where the rug with the pink child and the red-eyed dog used to be, she had stood with the tears streaming down her cheeks--tears of humiliation, of fierce outraged pride, feeling that the most colossal, crushing tragedy that possibly could come into any life had fallen upon her.
It came back to the last detail, that evening of torture--the audible innuendos and the whispering behind hands, the lifted eyebrows and the exchange of mocking looks, the insolent eyes of Neifkins, and the final deliberate insult--she lived it all again as she stood before the mirror calmly arranging her hair.
And Hughie! Her hands paused in mid-air. Could she ever forget that moment of agony on the stairs when she thought he was going to fail her--that he was ashamed, and a coward! But what a thoroughbred he had been! She could better appreciate now the courage it had required.
Afterward--in the moonlight--on the way home--his contrition, his sympathy, his awkward tenderness. "I love you--I'll love you as long as I live!" Her lips parted as she listened to the boyish voice--vibrating, passionate. He had come to her again and she had sent him away for the sake of the hour that was shortly to arrive. She had reached her goal. More than she had dared hope for in her wildest dreams had come to her at last. She had money, power, success, a name. A choking lump rose in her throat.
It was no longer of any use to refuse to admit it to herself--she wanted Hugh. She wanted him with all her heart and soul and strength, nothing and no one else. She threw herself upon the uninviting bed, and in the hour when she should have been exultant Kate cried.