“These New York girls’ hearts are like a ball of string, unwind the thing—and—there’s nothing left!”
Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, on her way down town, had stolen another glimpse at her own disturbed face. The crise des nerfs had clearly brought out to her the presaged passing of her beauty.
The little hand glass of the brougham told her, with brutal abruptness, that the face she was gravely studying must pale before the moonlight radiance of Alida VanSittart.
Face to face with her own sorrow, she saw the truth at last. Was it envy of the nymph-like girl or a dull hatred of Hathorn, for his cold ingratitude, which racked her heart?
“Perhaps, if I had told him all,” she murmured, “I will find out the lost link of my life yet, and there must be a man somewhere who would prove worthy of a woman’s whole confidence.
“One who could wander in le Jardin Secret, by my side!”
As she studied her own face, with a needless self-deprecation, there came back to her the handsome Western stranger.
“Perhaps,” she dreamily said, as her mind wandered away to the great dim Sierras, “uplifting their minarets of snow,” “he may have caught their majestic secret of truth and lofty freedom.”
And—she, too, drifted on to a cross-road of life.
Elaine Willoughby had finished her inspection of the counterfeit presentment afforded by the little mirror.