How had that been brought about?  How had they managed to talk to each other for anyway fifteen or twenty minutes without either a reference to their adventure or a palpable avoidance of it?  It wasn’t her doing.  From the moment when she got to the end of the lines she had rehearsed coming down the stairs, the lead had been in his hands.  Indeed, to the latter part of the talk, what she had contributed was no more than a question or two so flagrantly personal that they reminded her in review of some of her childish indiscretions with Wallace Hood.  How had he managed it?

He hadn’t been tactful.  She acquitted him altogether of that.  She couldn’t have endured tact this afternoon from anybody.  Of course, the mere expressiveness of his face helped a lot.  The look he had turned on Rush for example, that had stopped that nerve-racked boy in full career.  Or the look he gave her when he first learned of her father’s illness.  That sudden coming back from whatever his own preoccupation might have been to a vivid concern for her father.

Well, there, at last, it was.  That was his quality.  A genius for more than forgetting himself, for stepping clean out of himself into some one else’s shoes.  Wasn’t that just a long way of saying imagination?  He had illuminated her father for her and in so doing had given her a ray of real comfort.  He had interpreted Paula—­in terms how different from those employed by Aunt Lucile!  He had comprehended Rush without one momentary flaw of resentment.  Last of all, he had quite simply and without one vitiating trace of self-pity, explained himself, luminously, so that it was as if she had known him all her life.

One thing, to be sure, she didn’t in the least understand—­the very last thing he had said.  “That’s why it was so incredible when you came down the stairs instead.”  That had been to her, a complete non sequitur, an enigma.  But she was content to leave it at that.

Such a man, of course, could never—­belong to anybody.  He was not collectable.  There would always be about him, for everybody, some last enigma, some room to which no one would be given the key.  But there was a virtue even in the fringe of him, the hem of his garment.

Was she getting sentimental?  No, she was not.  Indeed, precisely what his little visit had done for her was to effect her release from a tangle of taut-drawn sentimentalities.  She hadn’t felt as free as this, as comfortable with herself, since she came home with Rush from New York.

She had no assurance that he’d come to the house again of his own accord or that Paula would send for him.  But she was in no mood to distress herself just now, even with that possibility.

She crossed the room and got herself a cigarette, and with it alight she returned to her contemplation of the piano keyboard.  She didn’t move nor speak when she heard Rush come in but she kept an eye on the drawing-room door and when presently he entered, she greeted him with a smile of good-humored mockery.  He had something that looked like a battered school atlas in his hand.