She was glad to have him go so quickly.  She wanted him to go so that she could think about him.  It was with a rather buoyant movement that she crossed the room to the piano bench and very lightly with her finger-tips began stroking the keys, the cool smooth keys with their orderly arrangement of blacks and whites, from which it was possible to weave such infinitely various patterns, such mysterious tissue.

A smile touched her lips over the memory of the picture her fancy had painted the night Paula sang his songs, the sentimental notion of Paula’s inspiring him with an occasional facile caress to the writing of other love songs.  She might have been a boarding-school girl to have thought of that.  She smiled, too, though a little more tenderly, over his own attempt—­naive he had called it—­to go in harness, like a park hack, submissive to Paula’s rein and spur.  Pegasus at the plow again.  She smiled in clear self-derision over her contemplated project of saving him from Paula.  He didn’t need saving from anybody.  He was one of those spirits that couldn’t be tied.  Not even his own best effort of submission could avail to keep the harness on his back.

It was most curious how comfortable she had been with him.  During the miserable month she had spent at home before she went to Wyoming with the Corbetts, she had dreaded a second encounter with March and had consciously avoided one.  To meet and be introduced as the strangers they were supposed by the rest of the family to be, to elaborate the pretense that this was what they were—­they who had shared those flaming moments while Paula sang!—­would be ridiculous and disgusting.  But anything else, any attempt to go on from where they had left off was unthinkable.  In the privacy of her imagination she had worked the thing out in half a dozen ways, all equally distressing.

She had not made good her resolution to quit thinking about him.  She was not able and did not even attempt to dismiss her adventure with him as a mere regrettable folly to be forgotten as soon as possible.  It had often come back to her during sleepless hours of the long nights and had always been made welcome.  She didn’t wish it defaced as she had felt it necessarily must be by the painful anti-climax of a second meeting.

The impulse upon which she had taken him out of old Nat’s hands was perhaps a little surprising now she looked back on it, but it had not astonished her at the time.  Of course, there, there was something concretely to be done, an injustice to be averted from a possibly innocent head.  She doubted though if it had been pure altruism.

Whatever its nature, the result of it had been altogether happy.  She was glad she had come down to see him.  There need be no misgiving now about the quality of their future encounters, were there to be any such.  They were on solid ground with each other.