Her gaze dropped back from the heights, and he felt that she became less elusive and more human.

“I’ve thought of you so often and so much,” she remarked with her smile of cordial sweetness.

“Not so often as I’ve thought of you.”  He laid, as he spoke, a folded paper upon the desk, “There’s an English review of the poems.  It’s rather good so I thought you might care to see it.”

She unfolded the paper; then pushed it from her with an indifferent gesture.  “It seems so long ago I can hardly believe I wrote them,” she returned, conscious as she uttered the mere ordinary words of a subdued yet singularly vivid excitement, which seemed the softer mental radiance left by an illumination which was past.

“I wonder why it should seem long to you,” said Adams slowly.  “I remember you used to complain that one was obliged to fly through phases of thought in order to test them all.”

“I’m not sure that I want to test them all now,” she replied.  “When one gets to a good place one would better stop and rest.”

“Then you are in a good place?” he asked, looking at her intently from his short-sighted eyes, which appeared to contract and narrow since he had taken off his glasses.

“I don’t know,” she evaded the question with a smile, “but if I am, I warn you, I shall stand still and rest.”

He laughed softly.  “I dare say you’re right, if there’s such a state as rest on the earth,” he answered.

The cheerful sound of his voice brought the tears suddenly to her eyes, and she remembered a man whom she had once seen in a hospital, smiling after a frightful accident through which he had passed.

“Are you yourself so tired?” she asked.

“I?” he shook his head.  “Oh, I was using the glittering generalities again.”

“And yet you seldom take even the smallest of vacations,” she insisted.

“One doesn’t need it when one is broken in as I am.  There’s a joy in getting one’s work behind one that the luxury of idleness does not know.”

“All the same I wish you’d stop awhile.”  Then she gave him one of her long, thoughtful looks and spoke with the beautiful, vibrant note in her voice which he had called its “Creole quality.”  “We have been such old, such close, such dear friends,” she went on, “that I wonder if I may tell you how profoundly—­how sincerely—­”

She faltered and he took up her unfinished sentence with the instinct to put her embarrassment at ease.  “I knew it all along, God bless you,” he said.  “One feels such things, I think.”

“One ought to,” she responded.

“It’s been hard,” he pursued frankly; and she was struck by the utter absence of picturesqueness, of the whining tone of the victim in his treatment of the situation.  There was no appeal to her sympathy in his manner, and he impressed her suddenly as a man who had come into possession of a power over the results of events if not over the passage of events themselves.  “It’s been harder, perhaps, than I can say—­poor girl,” he added quickly.