“Roger Adams!” she had echoed with a fleeting earnestness, “do you know I’ve always had a fancy that he is meant for Laura in another life.”

“In another life?” he questioned merrily.

“Oh, things went crosswise here, you see,” she answered, “but somewhere else, who knows?  They may all be straightened out.”

The question of Laura’s possible fate in “another life” failed somehow to disturb him seriously; but as he drove presently down the darkening street, under the high electric lights, he found himself wondering vaguely why Gerty had so persistently associated her friend with Roger Adams.

CHAPTER X

IN WHICH ADAMS COMES INTO HIS INHERITANCE

Five minutes had hardly passed after Laura was alone before the servant brought up the name of Roger Adams, and an instant later he was holding her hand in his cordial grasp.  At his appearance she had for a moment a sense of the returning reality of things—­the vigour of his hand clasp, the strong, kindly look of his face, the winning, protective tenderness of his smile, these gave her an impression of belonging to the permanent instead of to the merely evanescent part of life.  When he sat down in the big leather chair from which Kemper had risen, and removing his glasses, fixed upon her the attentive gaze of his narrow, short-sighted eyes, she felt immediately the first sensation of peace that she had known for many weeks.  His hand, long, heavily veined, muscular, and yet finely sensitive, lay outstretched upon the mahogany lid of her desk, and she found herself presently contrasting it with the square, brown, roughly shaped hand of Kemper.  Her senses, her brain, her heart were still full of her lover, yet she was able to feel through some strange enfranchisement of her dual nature, that there was a mental directness, an impassioned morality about the man she did not love in which the man she loved was entirely lacking.  But the knowledge of this curiously enough, served to increase rather than to diminish the persistent quantity of her emotion, and the few minutes during which Kemper had been absent from her had sufficed to exaggerate his image to a statue that was heroic in its proportions.  It was as if her heart—­she was still lucid enough to think in a figure of speech—­were an altar dedicated to the perpetual flame before a deity who had already showed himself to be both terrible and obscure.

Now as she sat looking, with her rapt gaze, at the man before her, she was thinking how absolutely and without reservation was her surrender to those particular qualities which Roger Adams did not represent.  Here, at this approaching crisis in her experience, it might have been supposed that her sense of humour would have lent something of its brilliance as a safeguard, but the weakness of her temperament lay in the very fact that her humour entered only into those situations where it could ornament without modifying the actual conditions of thought—­that she devoted to her passion for Kemper, as to the other merely temporary phenomena of the senses, a large intensity of outlook which only the eternal could support with dignity.