Some thought like this calms the seething waves of passion in her heart. She picks up her journal from the floor where it had fallen, and listlessly tears out the page that holds the simple rhyme of her girlhood's folly. Leaning on the window she takes it daintily between her fingers and tears it into tiny bits that scatter like snow-flakes down on the graveled path of the garden below.
"Loved by two," she says, musingly. "What was Bruce Conway's love worth, I wonder? Or Paul Winans' either, for that matter? The one fickle, unstable, the other jealous, proud, unbending as Lucifer! Not quite my ideal of perfect love, either one of them! After all, what is any man's love worth, I wonder, that it should blight a woman's life?"
Loved by three she might have said, but she did not know. How much the fleshly vail between our spirits hides from our finite eyes. How often and often a purer, better, stronger love than we have ever known is laid in silence at our feet, over which we walk blinded and never know the truth.
And yet by some odd chance, nay, rather unconscious prescience, she thinks of Willard Clendenon, recalling his words on the day of his sister's marriage:
"Never again on this side of eternity."
"What did it mean?" she mused aloud. "It was strange at the least. I trust no harm will come to Lulu, little darling. She is still well and happy, or at least her letters say so." And drawing from her pocket a letter lately received from Lulu, she ran over its contents again with all a woman's innocent pleasure in re-reading letters.
"How happy she seems," a faint smile curving the perfect lips; "and how devoted is Mr. Conway; how her innocent, joyous, loving heart mirrors itself in her letters! Sunshine, roses, honeymoon, bliss. Ah, me," with a light sigh chasing the smile away, "how evanescent are all things new and sweet; like that sky late aglow with the radiance of day, now darkening with the shades of twilight."
Norah comes in to light the gas, and is gently motioned away.
"Not yet, Norah. I have a fancy to sit in the twilight. You can come in later."