“I think you have suffered more from it than your wife has,” she observed, as she replaced the cup upon the tray.

Adams broke into his whimsical laugh.  “You don’t judge fair,” he retorted, “wait until I’m washed and in my right clothes again.  If there’s anything on earth that turns a man into a corpse, it is an evening suit by daylight.”

Then, as she went out with the tray, he endeavoured, while he changed his clothes, to pull himself, by an effort of will, into proper shape to meet the day’s work before him.

An hour afterward, as he walked through the morning sunlight to his office, he found that his unusual melancholy had vanished before the first breath of fresh air.  A sense of detachment—­of world-loneliness came over him as he looked at the passing crowd of strangers, but there was no sadness in the feeling, for he felt within himself the source as well as the renewal of his peace.  He had never regarded himself as what is called a religious man—­it was more than ten years since he had entered a church or heard a sermon—­yet in this very relinquishment of self, was there not something of the vital principle, of the quickening germ of all great religions?  Though he had never said in his thoughts “I believe this” or “I hold by this creed or that commandment,” his nature was essentially one in which the intellect must be supreme either for good or for evil; and in his soul, which had been for so long the battlefield of a spiritual warfare, there had dawned at last that cloudless sunrise of faith in which all lesser creeds are swallowed up and lost.  If he had ever attempted to put his religious belief into words, he would probably have said with his unfailing humour that it “sufficed to love his neighbour and to let his God alone.”

Now, as he passed rapidly through the humming streets, his thoughts were so anxiously engrossed by Connie’s condition that, when his name was uttered presently at his elbow, he started and looked up like one awakening uneasily from a dream.  The next moment the air swam before him and he felt his blood rush in a torrent from his heart, for the voice was Laura’s, and he discovered when he turned that she was looking up eagerly into his face.

“Nothing short of a meditation on the seven heavens can excuse such absorption of mind,” she said.

“You came like a spirit without my suspecting that you were near,” he answered, smiling.

She laughed softly, giving him her full face as she looked up with her unfathomable eyes and tremulous red mouth.  At the first glance he noticed a change in her—­an awakening he would have called it—­and for a minute he lost himself in a vague surmise as to the cause.  Then all other consciousness was swept away by pure delight in the mere physical fact of her presence.  For the instant, while they walked together through the same sunshine over the same pavement, she was as much his own as if they stood with each other upon a deserted star.