“That shows what nonsense stories are,” he said.  “That couldn’t happen to us in a thousand years.  She’s beautiful, and kindly, and affectionate.  She’s got temperament enough to blow the cork out of any bottle you tried to hold it down in.  But I couldn’t fall in love with her if I tried.  It doesn’t happen on that basis.  Besides which, it’s my belief that she’s altogether in love with her husband.  All the same, she’s taken me up.  She means to push me for all she’s worth and let her husband like it or lump it as he pleases.  She’s got some plans, I don’t know just what, for showing me off to one or two of the ‘right’ people to-day.  You can imagine what it will be like, can’t you?”

“I should think it would be rather good fun—­that sort of game,” she commented.

“That’s where the forks come in,” he said.  “And not having a proper coat.  That sort of social skill is the suit of armor those people wear.  I’ve got to go back to my room and sew up the rip Ben told me about and trim my cuffs and try to tie my necktie so that the worn-out spots won’t show-and make them do.”

It was but a few minutes later—­they had been silent ones—­that she stopped her car in front of the little grocery store where the rickety outside stair led up to his door.

“I’ll come in with you and sew up the rip in your coat,” she said.

She wouldn’t have made that offer, indeed would hardly have driven him up to his own door, if she had not been a young woman with steady nerves and a level head, and an abundant confidence in both.  Because that dingy little wooden building with its outside stair to his attic, was the nucleus of memories that had by no means lost their poignancy.  It was not, after all, so many years ago that she had mounted that stair for the first time, and it couldn’t be considered strange that her heart quickened a little as she climbed it now.

The room startled her by being so utterly unchanged.  Not only the major articles in it; the stove, the iron bed, the deal table he wrote at, the carpenter’s bench, the half invented musical typewriter that he had once attempted to convert an old square piano into, the hollow-backed easy chair,—­but the quite minor and casual trifles as well.  On top of the set of home-made shelves that served for his music and his books was a sort of still-life composed of a meerschaum pipe with a broken stem and an empty goblet of pressed glass, standing upon a yellow paper-covered copy of Anatole France’s Thais, that had been just like that the last time she was here.  She had stuck a bunch of sweet peas she was wearing into that goblet.  It made an uncannily short bridge to the past, a trivial reminder like that.

Evidently he felt it, too.  Perhaps he had followed her glance toward that dusty shelf corner.  Because, a moment after he had shut the door behind them, opened a window and taken a look at the fire, he came hesitantly and a little awkwardly up to her and took her by the shoulders as if to draw her into an embrace.  He was very gentle about it.