“Are they going to bring her here?”

“They can’t—­bedridden—­paralyzed, or something.  They’ve got to take her testimony on the spot.  I want to be there when they do it.  There are certain questions which it is most important to have asked.  In a way, it is not my business; but I’m going to make it mine.  I’ve mulled over the thing so long that I think I see the psychology of the whole drama.”

“I can never thank you enough for the interest you’ve shown,” she said, after a brief silence.

He gave his short, nervous laugh.

“Nor I you for giving me the chance to show it.  That’s where the kindness comes in.  It’s made a different world for me, and me a different man in it.  If anybody had told me last winter that I should spend the whole summer in town working on a criminal case—­”

“You shouldn’t have done that.  I wanted you to go away as usual.”

“And leave you here?”

“I shouldn’t have minded—­as long as Mr. Wayne preferred to stay.  It’s so hard for him to get about, anywhere but in the place he’s accustomed to.  New York in summer isn’t as bad as people made me think.”

“I too have found that true.  To me it has been a very happy time.  But perhaps my reasons were different from yours.”

She reflected a minute before uttering her next words, but decided to say them.

“I fancy our reasons were the same.”

The low voice, the simplicity of the sentence, the meanings in it and behind it, made him tremble.  It was then, perhaps, that he began to see most clearly the true nature of love, both as given and received.

“I don’t think they can be,” he ventured, hoping to draw her on to say something more; but she did not respond.

After all, he reflected, as they continued their walk more or less in silence, too many words would only spoil the minute’s bliss.  There was, too, a pleasure in standing afar off to view the promised land almost equal to that of marching into it—­especially when, as now, he was given to understand that its milk and honey were awaiting him.

XXI

It was the middle of October when Evie wrote from Lenox to say she would come to town to meet Ford on his arrival, begging Miriam to give her shelter for a night or two.  The Grants remaining abroad, Miss Jarrott had taken the house in Seventy-second Street for another winter, but as Evie would run up to New York alone she preferred for the minute to be Miriam’s guest.

“The fact is, I’m worried to death,” she wrote, confidentially “and you must help me to see daylight through this tangled mass of everybody saying different things.  Aunt Queenie has gone completely back on Herbert, just because Uncle Jarrott has.  That doesn’t strike me as very loyal, I must say.  I shouldn’t think it right to desert anybody, unless I wanted to.  I wouldn’t do it because some one else told me to—­not