There was the note of accomplishment, of success, in her voice, and she brushed her fine, soft hair with long, vigorous strokes which had in them something of this same quality of unwavering confidence.  To look at her as she sat, relaxed yet dominant, before the glass, was to recognize that she was a woman who had achieved the purpose of her life, who had succeeded in whatever she had undertaken.  Not a great purpose, perhaps—­there were hours when her purpose seemed to her to be particularly trivial—­but still, great or small, she had accomplished it.  She was not only directing Dinard’s now—­she was Dinard’s.  Without her the business would collapse like a house of cards, and it was because she knew this, because Madame also knew this, that she had been able to perfect the arrangements she had planned that May afternoon after her depressing visit to Judge Crowborough.  For she managed the house of Dinard’s now by an arrangement which gave her one third of the profits; and in the last six months, since this scheme had gone into effect, the business had grown tremendously in certain directions.  The millinery department, for instance, which Madame had once treated with such supercilious disdain, had become to-day the most fashionable hat shop in Fifth Avenue.  The work was hard, but the returns were wonderful; and with a strange gloating, she told herself that she was making money—­always more money for the children.  “When Fanny finishes school year after next, we’ll take a large apartment in Park Avenue, and spend every summer in Europe,” she concluded.

In the morning she rather expected to see O’Hara, but a month passed before she met him one evening in October, when she came home late from work.  The autumn rains had come and gone, destroying the fugitive bloom of Miss Polly’s flower-beds, and scattering the leaves of the elm tree in a moist, delicately tinted carpet over the grass.  An hour ago the sun had set in a purple cloud, and beneath the electric lights, which shone through the fog with a wan and spectral glimmer, the dark outlines of the city assumed an ominous vagueness.  There was no light in the house; and the deserted yard, silvered from frost and strewn with dead leaves, which lay in wind-drifts along the flagged walk, had the haunted aspect of a place where youth and happiness have passed so recently that the fragrance of them still lingers.

“Archibald went off to school without telling you good-bye,” she said in a friendly voice.  “He was much disappointed.”

Stopping in the walk, he looked at her with unaffected surprise.

“Why, I thought that was what you wanted!”

She met this quite honestly.  “Not after I talked to you.”

“What in thunder did I say to change your opinion of me?” The strong west wind blowing around him and lifting the roughened red hair from his forehead, appeared to lessen by contrast the breezy animation of his manner.