No, sardonic with these two she could never be.  Like that poor Elena, she might have mistaken Wander’s meanings.  He was a man of too elaborate gestures; something grandiose, inherently his, made him enact the drama of life with too much fervor.  It was easy, Honora had insinuated, for a woman to mistake him!

Kate gripped her two strong hands together and clasped them about her head in the first attitude of despair in which she ever had indulged in her life.  She was ashamed!  Honora had said there was nothing to be ashamed of in love.  But Kate would not call this meeting of her spirit with Karl’s by that name.  She had no idea whether it was love or not.  On the whole, she preferred to think that it was not.  But when they faced each other, their glances had met.  When they had parted, their thoughts had bridged the space.  When she dreamed, she fancied that she was mounting great solitary peaks with him to look at sunsets that blazed like the end of the world; or that he and she were strong-winged birds seeking the crags of the Andes.  What girl’s folly!  The time had come to put such vagrant dreams from her and to become a woman, indeed.

Ray telephoned that he was home.

“Come up this evening, then,” commanded Kate.

Then, not being as courageous as her word, she wept brokenly for her mother—­the mother who could, at best, have given her but such indeterminate advice.

XXIII

As she heard Ray coming up the stairs, she tossed some more wood on the fire and lighted the candles in her Russian candlesticks.

“It’s what any silly girl would do!” she admitted to herself disgustedly.

Well, there was his rap on the foolish imitation Warwick knocker.  Kate flung wide the door.  He stood in the dim light of the hall, hesitating, it would seem, to enter upon the evening’s drama.  Tall, graceful as always, with a magnetic force behind his languor, he impressed Kate as a man whom few women would be able to resist; whom, indeed, it was a sort of folly, perhaps even an impiety, to cast out of one’s life.

“Kate!” he said, “Kate!” The whole challenge of love was in the accent.

But she held him off with the first method of opposition she could devise.

“My name!” she admitted gayly.  “I used to think I didn’t like it, but I do.”

He came in and swung to the door behind him, flinging his coat and hat upon a chair.

“Do you mean you like to hear me say it?” he demanded.  He stood by the fire which had begun to leap and crackle, drawing off his gloves with a decisive gesture.

She saw that she was not going to be able to put him off.  The hour had struck.  So she faced him bravely.

“Sit down, Ray,” she said.

He looked at her a moment as if measuring the value of this courtesy.

“Thank you,” he said, almost resentfully, as he sank into the chair she placed for him.