“Roger is always worrying about my health,” she said, “but the truth is that it’s so good I’ll never begin to value it until it’s gone.”  Her excited, fluttering manner blew about her almost with a commotion of the atmosphere, and reminded Adams at times of a tempestuous March breeze shaking a fragile wind flower.  It was unnatural, overdone, unbecoming, but it seemed at last to have got quite beyond her control, and the pretty girlish composure he remembered as one of her freshest charms, was lost in her general violence of animation.  Of late he knew that she had fought off her natural exhaustion by the frequent use of stimulants, and it seemed to him that he saw their immediate effects in her flushed cheeks and too brightly shining eyes.

“Don’t stay out late,” he urged again; “you’ve been rushing like mad these last weeks and you need rest.”

“But I never rest,” rejoined Connie, still laughing, “and I honestly hope that I shan’t come to a stop until I die.”

She fastened her cloak under the fall of lace, and, when Brady had slipped into his overcoat, Adams turned back to open the hall door, which let in a biting draught.

“Ta-ta! don’t sit up!” cried Connie breathlessly, as, more than ever like a filmy wind flower in a high wind, she was blown down the steps, across the slushy sidewalk, and into the hired carriage.

When they had gone Adams went into the dining-room and dined alone without dressing, as he had done almost every evening for the last few months.  The Irish maid waited upon him with a solicitude in which he read his pose of a deserted husband, and he tried with a forcible, though silent, bravado to dispel her very evident assumption.  Connie had certainly not deserted him against his will, and when her absence had begun to show as so incontestable a relief it seemed the basest ingratitude to force upon her reckless shoulders the odium of an entirely satisfying arrangement.  After a day of mental and physical exertion the further effort of a conversation with her was something that he felt to be utterly beyond him, and the distant Colorado days when she had played the part of a soft, inviting kitten and he had responded happily to the appeal for constant petting, now lay very far behind them both—­buried somewhere in that cloudless country they had left.  Neither of them wanted the petting back again, and as he rose from his simple dinner and entered his study at the end of the hall he heaved a sigh of conscious thankfulness that it was empty.

While he lighted his pipe his eyes turned instinctively to his precious first editions of which Trent had spoken, and then straight as an arrow to a photograph of Laura which stood with several others upon his writing table.  The eyes of most men would have lingered, perhaps, on one of Connie, which was taken, indeed, at her best period and in a remarkably effective pose, but Adams’ glance brushed it with an indifference only unkind in its mute sincerity, while he sought