How that fact could account for the shortness of the remainder may not be immediately apparent to the prosaic mind, but it was obvious to Lady Newhaven.

That Hugh had begun to weary of her could not force the narrow entrance to her mind.

Such a possibility had never been even considered in the pictures of the future with which her imagination busied itself.
But what would the future be?
The road along which she was walking forked before her eyes, and her usual perspicacity was at fault.

She knew not in which of those two diverging paths the future would lie.
Would she in eighteen months' time--she should certainly refuse to marry within the year--be standing at the altar in a "confection" of lilac and white with Hugh; or would she be a miserable wife, moving ghostlike about her house, in colored raiment, while a distant grave was always white with flowers sent by a nameless friend of the dead?
"How some one must have loved him!" she imagined Hugh's aged mother saying.

And once, as that bereaved mother came in the dusk to weep beside the grave, did she not see a shadowy figure start up, black-robed, from the flower-laden sod, and, hastily drawing a thick veil over a beautiful, despairing face, glide away among the trees?
At this point Lady Newhaven always began to cry.