“Yes, that is settled—­I shall tell him to-morrow,” she said, as if surrendering her future into the power of chance or God or whatever stood outside herself, “it will happen as it must, I cannot change it.”  For a moment there was some comfort in the fatalism of this thought, and after blowing out the candle, she turned her face to the wall and fell at last into a troubled sleep.  But her sleep even was filled with perplexing questions, which she continued to ask herself with the same piercing mental clearness that tormented her when she was awake; and she passed presently into a vivid dream, in which she rescued the letter with burned hands, from the fire, and carried it to Kemper, who laughed and kissed her burns and threw the letter back into the flames.  “It has never really happened—­you have imagined it all,” he said, “you’ve dreamed Jennie Alta and now you’re dreaming me and yourself also.  Look up, for you are just beginning to awake.”  And when she looked up at his words, his face changed suddenly and she saw that it was Roger Adams who held her hands.

From this dream she awoke with a more distinct memory of Adams than she had had for many days; and she felt again the impulse to unburden her heart to him, which she had resisted on the afternoon they walked together down Fifth Avenue.  The dawn had begun to break, and while she waited impatiently for the growing light, she resolved with one of those promptings of wisdom, in which ordinary reason appeared to have no part, that when the morning came she would go to Adams’ office before seeing Kemper.  Then she remembered the distance which had sprung between them in the last few months, and it seemed to her to have grown still more impassable since the evening before.  But because the visit offered an excuse to postpone her confession to Kemper until the afternoon, she caught at it with an eagerness, which hurried her into her hat and coat as soon as her pretence of breakfasting with Angela was at an end.

The morning was bright and clear, and as she walked through the early sunshine in the street, she remembered the day, so long ago now, when she had met Adams going to his office at this hour, and she recalled, with a smile, that she had pitied him then because of the worn places on his overcoat.  She no longer pitied him now—­Gerty, herself, Perry Bridewell, even Kemper, she felt, might be deserving of compassion, but not Adams.  Yes, she, herself, in spite of her boasted strength had come at last to feel the need of being loved for the very weakness she had once despised.  But she knew that, though Adams might understand and forgive this weakness, in Kemper it would provoke only the scorn which she had begun to fear and dread.  Yet her intellect rather than her heart told her that Adams was a stronger man than Kemper and that his wider sympathies proved only that he was, also, the larger of the two.  Was the difference between them merely one of goodness, after all, her intellect, not her heart, demanded, and was it true that the perfect love could not enter except where this goodness had been to blaze the way before it in the soul?