He smiled at her across the table.

“You have great faith in those methods, haven’t you?”

“They work, Vin.”

He nodded as if no one knew that better than he.

Soon after dinner he went up-stairs to write some letters.  She followed him about ten o’clock.  She came and leaned one hand on his shoulder and one on his desk.

“Still working?” she said.  She had been aware of no desire to see what he was writing, but she was instantly aware that his blotting-paper had fallen across the sheet, that the sheet was not a piece of note-paper, but one of a large pad on which he had been apparently making notes.

Her diamond bracelet had slipped down her wrist and lay upon the blotting-paper; he slowly and carefully pushed it up her slim, round arm until it once more clung in place.

“I’ve nearly finished,” he said; and to her ears there was some under sound of pain or of constraint in his tone.

A little later he strolled, still dressed, into her room.  She was already in bed, and he came and sat on the foot of the bed, with one foot tucked under him and his arms folded.

Her mind during the interval had been exclusively occupied with the position of that piece of blotting-paper.  Could it be there was some other woman whose ghost-like presence she was just beginning to feel haunting their relation?  The impersonality of Vincent’s manner was an armor against such attacks, but this armor, as Adelaide knew, was more apparent than real.  If one could get beyond that, one was at the very heart of the man.  If some fortuitous circumstance had brought a sudden accidental intimacy between him and another woman—­What woman loving strength and power could resist the sight of Vincent in action, Vincent as she saw him?

Yet with a good capacity for believing the worst of her fellow-creatures, Adelaide did not really believe in the other woman.  That, she knew, would bring a change in the fundamentals of her relationship with her husband.  This was only a barrier that left the relation itself untouched.

Before very long she began to think the situation was all in her own imagination.  He was so amused, so eager to talk.  Silent as he was apt to be with the rest of the world, with her he sometimes showed a love of gossip that enchanted her.  And now it seemed to her that he was leading her on from subject to subject through a childish dislike to going to bed.  They were actually giggling over Mr. Lanley’s adventure when a motor-brake squeaked in the silence of the night, a motor-door slammed.  For the first time Adelaide remembered her daughter.  It was after twelve o’clock.  A knock came at her door.  She wrapped her swan’s-down garment about her and went to the door.

“O Mama, have you been worried?” the girl asked.  She was standing in the narrow corridor, with her arms full of shining favors; there could be no question whatever that she had stayed for the dance.  “Are you angry?  Have I been keeping you awake?”