37


THE   ALTAR   OF   THE   DEAD

This  picture  was  for  a  while  all  our  friend  saw  :  he
caught  his  breath  again  and  again  as  it  came  over  him
that  the  woman  with  whom  he  had  had  for  years  so
fine  a  point  of  contact  was  a  woman  whom  Acton
Hague,  of  all  men  in  the  world,  had  more  or  less
fashioned.  Such  as  she  sat  there  to-day  she  was  in-
effaceably  stamped  with  him.  Beneficent,  blameless
as  Stransom  held  her,  he  couldn't  rid  himselt  of  the
sense  that  he  had  been,  as  who  should  say,  swindled.
She  had  imposed  upon  him  hugely,  though  she  had
known  it  as  little  as  he.  All  this  later  past  came
back  to  him  as  a  time  grotesquely  misspent.  Such  at
least  were  his  first  reflexions  ;  after  a  while  he  found
himself  more  divided  and  only,  as  the  end  of  it,
more  troubled.  He  imagined,  recalled,  reconstituted,
figured  out  for  himself  the  truth  she  had  refused  to
give  him  ;  the  effect  of  which  was  to  make  her  seem
to  him  only  more  saturated  with  her  fate.  He  felt
her  spirit,  through  the  whole  strangeness,  finer  than
his  own  to  the  very  degree  in  which  she  might  have
been,  in  which  she  certainly  had  been,  more  wronged.
