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 decided to go so soon. . . . It'll be dreary without you or Sybil."

"You can go, too," said Sabine quickly. "There is a way. He'd give up everything for you . . . everything. I know that." Suddenly she gave Olivia a sharp look. "You're thirty-eight, aren't you?"

"Day after to-morrow I shall be forty!"

Sabine was tracing the design of roses on Horace Pentland's Savonnerie carpet with the tip of her parasol. "Gather them while you may," she said and went out into the blazing heat to cross the meadows to Brook Cottage.

Left alone, Olivia knew she was glad that day after to-morrow Sabine would no longer be here. She saw now what John Pentland meant when he said, "Sabine ought never to have come back here."

The heat clung on far into the evening, penetrating with the darkness even the drawing-room where they sat—Sabine and John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames and Olivia—playing bridge for the last time, and as the evening wore on the game went more and more badly, with the old lady forgetting her cards and John Pentland being patient and Sabine sitting in a controlled and sardonic silence, with an expression on her face which said clearly, "I can endure this for to-night because to-morrow I shall escape again into the lively world."

Jean and Sybil sat for a time at the piano, and then fell to watching the bridge. No one spoke save to bid or to remind Mrs. Soames that it was time for her shaking hands to distribute the cards about the table. Even Olivia's low, quiet voice sounded loud in the hot stillness of the old room.

At nine o'clock Higgins appeared with a message for Olivia—that Mr. O'Hara was being detained in town and that if