'I used to dream,' he said huskily, 'of a time when failure should have come, when she would want some one to step in and shield her.

Sometimes I thought of her protected in my arms against the world.

But now!' She felt the truth of his unspoken argument--of all that his tone implied.

In the minds of both the same image gathered shape and distinctness.

Isabel Bretherton in the halo of her great success, in all the intensity of her new life, seemed to her and to him to stand afar off, divided by an impassable gulf from this simple, human craving, which was crying to her, unheard and hopeless, across the darkness..