That morning Leilah had two appointments, one with a modiste, the other with Violet Silverstairs. She did not feel equal to either. The episode of the previous evening had been to her like the supreme torture which medieval legislation devised. It was all she could bear—and more!

When, abruptly, she found herself face to face with Verplank, it was as though she were confronted by the dead. The sense of it numbed her, and the numbness was heightened by a horror that has no name. Into the seats of thought there entered the realisation that, in spite of all, she still loved him, that in spite of all he still loved her. In the core of these convictions fear entered, fear of him, fear of herself, a sensation of common peril and mutual perdition so blinding that Barouffski’s rudeness she barely noticed, and it was with a look the damned may have that she saw Verplank turn with Violet Silverstairs, and go.

As they passed, Barouffski, with the air of one commenting on a triviality, remarked:

“How odd it is that the Joyeuses should care to hobnob with demi-castors. Shall we go?”

That demi-castors meant bounders generally, and, in this instance, specifically, she would, ordinarily, have been insufficiently familiar with the slang of the boulevards to know. But she did not hear. Moreover, the remark required no reply. Even otherwise she was unable to speak, and it was not until Barouffski reiterated his suggestion that mechanically she acceded to it with a movement of the head.

Her demeanor then in traversing the salons, her leave-taking of the duchess, her bearing in descending the stairs, were as mechanical as her reply to Barouffski, and it was not until after the motor had dropped him, as he had asked that it should, at the door of the Little Club, that, at last alone, the mental anchylosis fell by.

At once in a sort of retrograde vision, she relived the past. There had been the flight from Coronado, the halt at Salt Lake, the descent into Nevada, the divorce, the journey abroad, the platonic marriage to Barouffski. These—the succeeding episodes in the drama of her life—were so many hostages to joy, barricades thrown one after another between Verplank and herself, and unavailingly thrown, since, with but a look, they were almost destroyed.

They had seemed wholly impregnable, but she knew then that unless reinforced by surer bars, they would one and all collapse. At the foreknowledge of that she appreciated what the heroines in the old tragedies endured, when circled by the seven-times-twisted coil of fate. Yet, though they had yielded, she would not yield, and it was with this determination that she alighted in the rue de la Pompe.

The house there had a church for neighbour, and stood between a court and a garden. Before the court was a high, white wall. The garden extended back to the parallel street, where, also, was a wall. The entrance to the court was a double doorway, the entrance to the garden was an iron gate. Between the gate and the house were large urns, a marble bench, a marble chair, most noticeably the kennels of two mastiffs, pets of Barouffski who, at whatever hour he returned at night, had them loosed. They were, he declared, a great protection, as indeed they were—for him. Apart from the occasional barking of these dogs, barring also occasional music from the church, usually the garden was quiet. But that was in the order of things. It lacked both stable and garage. These had been secured elsewhere.

Except for that detail, the arrangements generally were satisfactory. The house was commodious, agreeably furnished. On the ground floor were the usual offices, beneath which the servants slept. On the floor above were the salons and dining hall. Above these were the bedrooms. On this upper floor the apartment which Barouffski occupied gave on the street, while Leilah’s overlooked the garden.

Adjacent to her suite was a stairway designed for servants, but which, because of its convenience, she occasionally used. It led directly to the dining hall, and from there she could descend into the garden.

It had a superior advantage. It enabled her to avoid the hazards of the main stairway, which was used by Barouffski, whom nearer acquaintance had discovered to her without the mask—without one mask, that is—for histrion that he was, he had many, but the best, the feigned nobility of noble pride, the assumed parage, had gone.

In its place was a smile, constant, equivocal, ambiguous, a smile such as the consciously damned may display. It gave Leilah little creeps. She dreaded it, dreaded him, dreaded both, what is worse she dreaded instinctively, without knowing why. The man was amiable, serviceable, gallant. He wore his domino not faultlessly perhaps but with the fine air of a bravo who, when the time comes, will knife you, yes, but who in so doing will rather require that you admire the chasing on the handle of the blade. As yet the knife was concealed. But Leilah felt that it was there. He knew it was. Occasionally he fingered the point.

Hitherto he had lived by expedients. A golden six had been tossed him. He had pocketed it. For him the economic problem of life was solved. He asked little else, merely that the solution should endure and that his dignity, of which he had a humorous conception, be outwardly preserved. In addition to his dignity, or to his idea of it, he had another attribute. He was not exacting. It is a great charm in any one. But with him it did not extend to money. Freely he demanded it, freely she gave and it was precisely when he demanded it that she felt, and he felt, too, the point of the knife.

On this evening when, after the usual din at the doors, the motor entered the court and she alighted at the perron, two footmen busied themselves in aiding her.

Leilah passed through the dining room to the garden where for a while she walked along the path that led from the house to the gate.

The garden was cloistered, the night serene. The influences of both affected her. The darkness put her thoughts into relief, the solitude relaxed the tension of her nerves.

Another thing was helpful, the determination which she had reached, though for that determination to be maintained there must, she saw, be further hostages, new barricades. But what further hostages could she give she wondered, what firmer barricades was it possible to erect? Barring flight or an appeal to Verplank, some message begging him to leave Paris, she could not imagine any. Flight she had already tried, but not flight to some one of the world’s far away places where any one may be lost forever. It was a miserably dismal thing to do, she reflected, a thing so dismal and so miserable that she doubted her ability to do it.

As she thought it over she wondered if in some former existence she could have injured Verplank and whether it were by way of retribution that he had the power to tempt and torture her now. Tenets of this character the Vidy advanced and as she had told Tempest, she had come to believe in that Scripture as many do in the Bible, though as many also do without being able to accept it entirely, without being able to accept for instance stories such as that of Jonah and the whale which none the less all would accept were it known how profound is the symbolism behind them. With like reservations, Leilah accepted the VidyÂ. She was very ignorant as women in her station generally are and the reservations were due to that ignorance and also to the demand which the doctrine made on her imagination. But though she was ignorant she was conscious of it and consciousness of ignorance is usually the condition precedent to enlightenment.

Now, in considering the episode of the evening, she asked herself whether she was warranted in accepting this creed of past lives. At the Joyeuses, during the announcements of resonant names, Tempest had said that unless we swallow the ridiculous dogma of a soul specially created at every birth and unless too we are indecent enough to fancy the Deity waiting for that purpose on the passions and caprices of man, we have to accept it, have to accept with it the corollary of past actions and their consequences, have to accept, too, the deduction that, in accordance with our past actions, it is we who reward or punish ourselves, we who become avenging furies or angels of light.

Leilah wished that she could have discussed the matter more fully with Tempest yet she felt that what he had said was logical, but if it were true, then the parallel doctrine that all misdeeds and with them all misfortunes spring from desire must be true also, in which case, before their consequences can be effaced, all misdeeds must be atoned. But how can they be atoned? she asked herself. Presently she remembered. According to the VidyÂ, any desire no matter what, desire for pleasure, for gain, for attainments, for honours, even the desire for spiritual perfection, even the desire for the lack of desire, must be extinguished before old scores are paid. That was the way she saw, the only way. The debtor must sacrifice himself to himself.

But, uncertain still, she went over the matter again, putting to it little tests, passably naÏf yet serviceable to her. She had ardently desired to marry Verplank, then, desiring as ardently a barricade against him, she had married Barouffski. In the one case the result had been catastrophic; in the other, calamitous. Doubtless she had sinned in the past and these disasters, brought about by her own desires, were her punishment. There were other things that she had desired. She had wanted to be loved, she had wanted to be thought a beauty, and not only her love had shamed her but soon she might be ashamed to show her face. At the thought of these things she realised anew and more profoundly than ever that selfish desire is the root of evil and that only in its extirpation may peace be had. But coincidently she realised also that any such extirpation was beyond her. Heredity, environment, the circumstances of her life, had given an impetus to desire which she could not arrest. She liked wealth, ease, pretty clothes, becoming hats, the society of agreeable people. She liked the world and in liking it she feared that she liked also the flesh, it might be even that she liked, too, the devil. Yet, she must not, she knew.

In telling herself that, she thought of the Church. The Church was so much more comfortable. There you were not asked impossibilities, the one requirement was to throw yourself in her arms and repent. As the facile process occurred to her she recalled George Moore’s story of Evelyn Innes. That masterwork seemed to tell her to do as the heroine had done and go in a convent.

Perhaps she might, she thought. Perhaps she must.

Several times already she had crossed and recrossed the garden. Now she found herself at the farther end facing the iron gate. Leilah opened it, walked to the corner and returned.

The little tentative evasion had been successful. At any time, unseen even by a servant, she could leave the house, disappear utterly, be forever ingulfed. But the knowledge that she could escape into darkness and be lost there, offered little more than a choice between tears. It presented a form of suicide which was superior only to actual death. She hoped she might be spared it. She hoped an appeal to Verplank would suffice, though in what manner it could best reach him, or, for that matter, reach him at all, she found it difficult to decide. To make it personally was impossible. To attempt it through Violet Silverstairs would involve an explanation and that was impossible also. The idea of employing one of her women occurred to her. There were manifest objections to such a course, though the particular woman whom she had in view she trusted entirely.

Slowly she returned to the house and went to her room. There, when at last the servants had gone and she was alone, she knelt on a prie-dieu and, to the Watchers of the Seven Spheres, prayed for the earthly peace of her soul and of his. She knew that no prayer could affect them, she knew that they are not to be propitiated or coerced, but it soothed her as prayer, in raising the vibrations, does soothe the distressed. The prayer concluded she began another. She prayed that sometime she might be somewhere, on some plane, where all things broken are made complete and found again things vanished.

Then, the solace of it still upon her, suddenly she saw by what the prayer had been induced. The consciousness confused and presently, in the melancholy sotto-voce of thought, she told herself that to extinguish that desire, she would have to be in Dharmakaya—the mystic state where there is oblivion of all things here.

“Here!” she caught herself repeating. For, at once, a passage from the Upanishads prompting, she remembered that here means Myalba, which is hell, the greatest of all hells and, for those of this evolution, the only hell there is.

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