“I’ve racked my brain to amuse him,” remarked Gerty, while she watched him gravely, “but he can’t get his mind off that possible attack of pneumonia, and he’s even made me look up the death rate from it in the bulletin of the Board of Health.  Do you think Arnold would come if I telephoned him? or shall I send instead for Roger Adams?  I have even thought of writing invitations to his entire club list.”

“Oh, I’ll send Arnold myself,” rejoined Laura, “he got back just last night, you know.”

“I saw him coming up at five o’clock when I went to the doctor’s,” returned Gerty; and this innocent chance remark plunged Laura immediately into a melancholy which not only arrested the words upon her lips, but seemed to deaden her whole body even to her hands which held her muff.  An intolerable suspicion seized her that they were aware of the return of Madame Alta, that they blamed Arnold for something of which they did not speak, that they pitied her because she was deluded into an acceptance of the situation.  Though her judgment told her that this suspicion was a mere wild fancy, still she could not succeed in driving it from her thoughts, and the more she struggled against it, the stronger was the hold it gained upon her imagination if not upon her reason.  In the effort to banish this persistent torment, she began to talk fast and recklessly of other things, until the animation with which she spoke rekindled the old brilliant fervour in her face.

She was still talking with her restless gayety, when Adams came in to ask after Perry, but with his presence a stillness which was almost one of peace, came over her.  At the end of a few minutes she rose to leave, and a little later as he walked with her along Sixty-ninth Street in the direction of the Park, she had, for the first time in her life, a vague intuition that the secret of happiness, after all, might lie for her, not in the gratification but in the relinquishment of desire.

“I saw Kemper a while ago,” he remarked, as they crossed Fifth Avenue to the opposite sidewalk which ran along the wall under the bared November trees.  “He seemed very much interested in some mining scheme which Barclay has gone in for.  I never saw him more enthusiastic.”

“Was he?” she asked indifferently; and she felt almost a resentment against Kemper because he could pass so easily from the reconciliation with her to the subject of mining.  Since the evening before, when she had received the news of his absence with Madame Alta, her attitude to her lover had, unconsciously to herself, undergone a change; and her critical faculty, so long dominated by her feeling, appeared now to have usurped the place which was formerly held by her ideal image of him.  But this awakening of her intellect had no power whatever over her love, which remained unaltered, and the one result of her clearer mental vision was to destroy her happiness, while it did not lessen the strength of her emotion.