“Oh, I hoped you’d ordered it,” said Kemper, “upon my word I’m sorry—­I fear you must have had a stupid wait.”

He entered with his breathless, though smiling, apology, touched the bell for Wilkins as he crossed the room, and offered his hand first to Gerty and then to Laura with an equally enthusiastic pressure.  The clear red was still in his face, and his eyes beamed with animation as he stood warming himself before the fire.

“Have you been here long?” he asked, looking at his watch with a slight frown.  “By Jove, I’m a good half hour after time.  What did you do with yourselves while you cursed me?”

“First we looked at the portrait—­which I hate—­then we read the names of all your silly books,” responded Laura, with a dissimulation so natural that Gerty was divided between regret for her sincerity and admiration for her acting.

“Well, it doesn’t do to quarrel not only with our bread and meat, but with our automobiles, too,” protested Kemper lightly, “It’s a good thing I’ve gone in for, and it all came of my riding up in the train with Barclay to the Adirondacks—­otherwise he’d have been too sharp to have put me on to the tip.”  Then his rapid glance travelled to the portrait leaning against a chair, and he put a question with the same eager interest he had shown in the subject of mining.  “So you’ve had time to come to judgment on the French fellow.  What do you think of him?”

“It’s not you—­I won’t believe it,” replied Laura merrily, “if he’s right, then I’ve been deluded into marrying the wrong man.”

“Oh, he goes in for style, of course,” remarked Kemper, closing one eye as he fell back and examined the picture, “most of the French people do, you know.”

The radiance which belonged to an inner illumination rather than to any outward flush of colour, had suffused Laura’s face, until she seemed to glow with an animation which revealed itself not only in her look and voice, but in her whole delicate figure, so fragile, yet so full of energy.  There was something unnatural, almost feverish in the brightness of her eyes and in the rapid gestures of her small expressive hands.  To Gerty she appeared to resemble a beautiful wild bird, helplessly beating its wings in the fowler’s net.

“But isn’t their style mostly affectation as their strength is only coarseness?” she asked eagerly, wondering as she spoke, what her words meant and why she should have chosen these out of the whole English language.  “Isn’t it truth, after all,” she added, with the same excited emphasis, “that we need in life?” It occurred to her suddenly that she was repeating words which someone else had said before her, and she tried to remember what the occasion was and who had uttered them.

Then as she looked at Kemper, she found herself wondering if they would be obliged, in order to make life bearable, to lie to each other every day they lived?  The letter which she had destroyed was her half of this lie, she saw, and it seemed to her that Kemper’s share was in his old love for Jennie Alta.  But, to her surprise, when she thought of this it aroused no torment, hardly any disturbance in her heart, for Kemper and his love for her appeared to her now in an entirely new and different aspect, and she realised that because of the lie between them, even the emotion he aroused in her had turned worthless in her eyes.