The young woman turned her head to glance into a shop-window and then there could be no mistaking that cheek and chin and the peculiar relation of the long lashes to the brow.  It was the profile whose imprint had become indelible on his mind when he had come round an elbow of rock on Galeria.  The Jack of wild, tumultuous pleading who had parted from Mary Ewold on the pass became a Jack elate with the glad, swimming joy of May sunshine at seeing and speaking to her again.

“Mary!  Mary!” he cried.  “My, but you’ve become a grand swell!” he breathed delectably, with a fuller vision of her.

“Jack!”

There was a nervous twitching of her lips.  He saw her eyes at first in a blaze of surprise and wonder; then change to the baffling sparkle, hiding their depths, of the slivers of glass on the old barrier.  His smile and hers in unspoken understanding said that two comrades of another trail had met on the Avenue trail.  There had not been any Leddy; there had not been any scene on the pass.  They were back to the conditions of the protocol he had established when they started out from the porch of the Ewold bungalow in the airiest possible mood to look at a parcel of land.

“And you also have become a grand swell!” she said.  “Did you expect that I should be in a gray riding-habit?  Certainly I didn’t expect to see you in chaps and spurs.”

It was brittle business; but with a common resource in play they managed it well.  And there they were walking together, noted by passers-by for their youth and beaming oblivion to everything but themselves.

“How long have you been here?” Jack asked.

“Two weeks,” she answered.

Two weeks in the same town and this his first glimpse of her!  What a maze New York was!  What a desert waste of two weeks!

“Yes.  Our decision to come was rather abrupt,” she explained.  “A sudden call to travel came to father; came to him like an inspiration that he could not resist.  And how happily he has entered into the spirit of the city again!  It has made him young.”

“And it has been quite like martyrdom for you!” Jack put in, teasingly.

“Terrible!  Sackcloth and ashes!”

“I see you are wearing the sackcloth.”

She laughed outright, with a downward glance at her gown, at once in guilt and appreciation.

“Another whim of father’s.”

“The Doge a scapegoat for fashion!”

“Not a scapegoat—­a partisan!  He insisted on going to one of the best places.  Could I resist?  I wanted to see how I felt, how I appeared.”

“The veritable curiosity of a Japanese woman getting her first foreign gown!”

“Thank you!  That is another excuse.”

“And it certainly looks very well,” Jack declared.

“Do you think so?” Mary flushed slightly.  She could not help being pleased.  “After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis naturally, without awkwardness?  Did I still know how to wear a fine gown?”—­and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as surely as certain gifts were born in Jack.  “But,” she added, severely, “I have only two—­just two!  And the cost of them!  It will take the whole orange crop!”