“Popple’s giving a tea?” Ralph struck an attitude of mock consternation.  “Ah, in that case—!  In Popple’s society who wouldn’t forget the flight of time?”

He had recovered his usual easy tone, and Laura sat that Mrs. Van Degen’s words had dispelled his preoccupation.  He turned to his cousin.  “Will you trust me with your present for the boy?”

Clare gave him the parcel.  “I’m sorry not to give it myself.  I said what I did because I knew what you and Laura were thinking—­but it’s really a battered old Dagonet bowl that came down to me from our revered great-grandmother.”

“What—­the heirloom you used to eat your porridge out of?” Ralph detained her hand to put a kiss on it.  “That’s dear of you!”

She threw him one of her strange glances.  “Why not say:  ’That’s like you?’ But you don’t remember what I’m like.”  She turned away to glance at the clock.  “It’s late, and I must be off.  I’m going to a big dinner at the Chauncey Ellings’—­but you must be going there too, Ralph?  You’d better let me drive you home.”

In the motor Ralph leaned back in silence, while the rug was drawn over their knees, and Clare restlessly fingered the row of gold-topped objects in the rack at her elbow.  It was restful to be swept through the crowded streets in this smooth fashion, and Clare’s presence at his side gave him a vague sense of ease.

For a long time now feminine nearness had come to mean to him, not this relief from tension, but the ever-renewed dread of small daily deceptions, evasions, subterfuges.  The change had come gradually, marked by one disillusionment after another; but there had been one moment that formed the point beyond which there was no returning.  It was the moment, a month or two before his boy’s birth, when, glancing over a batch of belated Paris bills, he had come on one from the jeweller he had once found in private conference with Undine.  The bill was not large, but two of its items stood out sharply.  “Resetting pearl and diamond pendant.  Resetting sapphire and diamond ring.”  The pearl and diamond pendant was his mother’s wedding present; the ring was the one he had given Undine on their engagement.  That they were both family relics, kept unchanged through several generations, scarcely mattered to him at the time:  he felt only the stab of his wife’s deception.  She had assured him in Paris that she had not had her jewels reset.  He had noticed, soon after their return to New York, that she had left off her engagement-ring; but the others were soon discarded also, and in answer to his question she had told him that, in her ailing state, rings “worried” her.  Now he saw she had deceived him, and, forgetting everything else, he went to her, bill in hand.  Her tears and distress filled him with immediate contrition.  Was this a time to torment her about trifles?  His anger seemed to cause her actual physical fear, and at the sight he abased himself in entreaties for forgiveness.  When the scene ended she had pardoned him, and the reset ring was on her finger...