“Then make your own,” he answered, as he rose from his chair, but his eyes and the strong pressure of his hand on hers said more than this.

“When I’ve read through the manuscript I’ll talk to you about it,” she observed, as he was leaving “If you really want them published, though, they must be considerably altered.”

“Oh, do it yourself,” he returned, with an embarrassed eagerness.  “Do anything you please—­put in the literary stuff and all that.”

He spoke with an entire unconsciousness of the amount of work he asked of her, and she liked him the better for the readiness with which he took for granted that she possessed the patience as well as the will to serve him.

“Well, we’ll talk about it later,” she said, and then for the first time during the conversation she raised upon him, in all its mystery of suggestion, that subtle fascination of look which he felt at the instant to be her transcendent if solitary beauty.  Through the afternoon he had waited patiently for this remembered smile—­had laid traps for it, had sought in vain to capture it unawares, and had she been a worldly coquette bent upon conquest, she could not have used her weapons with a finer or more decisive effect.  After more than two hours in which her remoteness had both disappointed and irritated him, he went away at last with her face at its most radiant moment stamped upon his memory.

CHAPTER V

SHOWS THE DANGERS AS WELL AS THE PLEASURES OF THE CHASE

When Kemper looked at his watch on Laura’s steps, he found that he had time only to pay a promised call on Gerty Bridewell before he must hurry home to get into his dinner clothes.  In his pocket, carelessly thrust there as he left his rooms, was a note from Gerty begging him to drop in upon her for a bit of twilight gossip; and though the request was made with her accustomed lightness, he knew instinctively that she had sought him less for diversion than for advice, and that her reckless pen had been guided by some hidden agitation.  When he thought of her it was with a sympathy hardly justified by the outward brilliance of her life—­wealth, beauty, power, all the things which he would have called desirable were hers, and the vague compassion she awoke in him appeared to him the result of a simple trick of pathos which she knew how to assume at times.  To be sorry for Gerty was absurd, he had always looked upon a hunger for married romance as a morbid and unhealthy passion, and that a woman who possessed a generous husband should demand a faithful one as well seemed to him the freak of an unreasonable and exacting temper.  “Men were not born monogamous”—­it was a favourite cynicism of his, for he was inclined to throw upon nature the full burden of her responsibility.

Then, as he signalled a cab at the corner of Fifth Avenue, and after seating himself, clasped his gloved hands over the crook of his walking stick, his thoughts returned, impatient of distraction, to the disturbing memory of Laura.