were vital between them.  What passed thus defied all analysis of thought, as well as all utterance in language, but it was understood by each in his or her own way.  To her it was the greeting and farewell of souls in different spheres, who again pass one another in space.  For him it was the dumb, stifled cry of nature, the claim of a heart demanding its rightful place in another heart, the protest of love that has been debarred from its return by a cruel code of morals, a preposterous convention, grown suddenly meaningless to a woman like her and to a man like him.  Something like this it would have been a relief to him to cry out, had not the strong hand of custom been upon him and forced him to say that which was far below the pressure of his yearning.

“This isn’t the time to talk about what I owe you,” he said, feeling the insufficiency of his words; “it’s too much to be disposed of in a few phrases.”

“On the contrary, you owe me nothing at all.”

“We’ll not dispute the point now.”

“No; but I’d rather not leave you under a misapprehension.  If I’ve done anything to-night—­been of any use at all—­it’s been simply because I loved Dorothea—­and—­and—­it was right.  When it was in my power, I couldn’t have refused to do it for any one—­for any one, you understand.”

“Oh yes, I understand perfectly; but any one, in the same circumstances, would feel as I do.  No, not as I do,” he corrected, quickly.  “No one else in the world could feel—­”

“I’m really very tired,” she said, hurriedly; “I’ll go now; but I count on you to call me.”

He watched her while she glided across the room; but it was only when her door had closed and he had dropped into his seat that he was able to state to himself the fact that the mere sight of her again had demolished all the barricades he had been building in his heart against her for the last six months.  They had fallen more easily than the walls of Jericho at the blast of the sacred horn.  The inflection of her voice, the look from her eyes, the gestures of her hands, had dispelled them into nothingness, like ramparts of mist.  But it was not that alone!  He was too much a man of affairs not to give credit to the practical abilities she had shown that night.  No graces of person or charms of mind or resources of courage could have called forth his admiration more effectively than this display of prosaic executive capacity.  What had to be done she had done more promptly, wisely, and easily than any man could have accomplished it.  She had foreseen possibilities and forestalled accident with a thoroughness which he himself could not have equalled.

“My God!” he groaned, inwardly, “what a wife she would have made for any man!  How I could have loved her, if it hadn’t been for—­”

He stopped abruptly and leaped to his feet, looking around dazed on the great empty hail, at the end of which a porter slept in his chair, while the clerk blinked drowsily behind his desk.