“Are you bound now,” he asked, “for Gramercy Park?”

She nodded “But I’d like to walk a block or two.  I’ve been shut up all the afternoon with Gerty.”

“She’s not ill, I hope,” he remarked, as he fell into step at her side.  “I’ve always had a considerable liking for Mrs. Bridewell, and for Perry, too.  He’s a first-rate chap.”

For a moment Laura walked on rapidly, without replying.  It seemed to her abominable that Adams should confess to an admiration for Perry Bridewell, and the generous humanity which she had formerly respected in him now offended her.

“He is not a favourite of mine,” she commented indifferently; then moved by a flitting impulse, she added after a pause, “By the way, do you know, I’ve met his cousin.”

Adams looked a little mystified as he echoed her remark.

“His cousin?” But in an instant further light broke upon him.  “Oh, you mean Arnold Kemper!”

“I met him at Gerty’s,” explained Laura, “but I can’t say honestly that he particularly appealed to me.  There’s something about him—­I don’t know what—­that runs up against my prejudices.”

Adams laughed.

“I rather fancy the prejudices are more than half gossip,” he observed.

“I’d forgotten what I’d heard about him,” rejoined Laura, shaking her head.

They had reached a crossing, and he dropped a little behind her while she walked on with the flowing yet energetic step she had inherited from her Southern mother.  On the opposite corner he came up with her again and resumed the conversation where they had let it fall.

“I never see Kemper now,” he said, “but I still feel that we are friends in a way, and I believe if I were to run across him to-morrow he’d be quite as glad to see me as if we hadn’t parted fifteen years ago.  The last time I saw much of him, by the way, we roughed it together one autumn on the coast of Nova Scotia, and I remember he volunteered there to go out in the first heavy gale to bring in some fishermen who had been caught out in the ice.  They tied a rope around his waist and he went and brought the men in, too, though we feared for a time that his hands would be frozen off.”

“Oh, I dare say he has pluck,” observed Laura, and though her voice was constrained, she was conscious of a sudden moral exhilaration, such as she sometimes experienced after reading a great poem or seeing a Shakespearian tragedy upon the stage.  The lights and the noises and the people in the street became singularly vivid, while she moved on in an excitement which she could not explain though she felt that it was wholly pleasurable.  Kemper was present to her now in a nobler, almost a glorified, aspect, and she began, though she herself was hardly aware of it, to idealise him with the fatal ardour of a poet and a dreamer.  There was a splendour to her in his old heroic deed—­a glow that transfigured, like some clear northern light, the storm and the danger and even the ice bound fishermen—­and she told herself that it would be impossible ever to atone to him for her past rudeness.