The day was sultry. She tried to
collect herself. Margaret knew well the part in which she sat, for in the
enthusiastic days that seemed so long gone by she was accustomed to come
there for the sake of a certain tree upon which her eyes now rested.
It had all the slim delicacy of a Japanese print. The leaves were slender
and fragile, half gold with autumn, half green, but so tenuous that the
dark branches made a pattern of subtle beauty against the sky. The hand
of a draughtsman could not have fashioned it with a more excellent
skill. But now Margaret could take no pleasure in its grace. She felt
a heartrending pang to think that thenceforward the consummate things
of art would have no meaning for her. She had seen Arthur the evening
before, and remembered with an agony of shame the lies to which she had
been forced in order to explain why she could not see him till late that
day. He had proposed that they should go to Versailles, and was bitterly
disappointed when she told him they could not, as usual on Sundays, spend
the whole day together.
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