Alta, painted in a large black hat with a falling feather which shadowed the golden aureole of her hair.  Kemper seldom looked at the picture, and when he did so it was with the casual glance he bestowed upon a piece of household furniture; his emotion had been so bound up with the concrete fact of a fleshly presence that in the continued absence of the prima donna he had found it difficult even to realise the condition of her unchanged existence.  In his whole life the past had never engrossed him to the immediate exclusion of the present.

When he had finished his cigar, he rose slowly to his feet, shook himself with an energetic movement as if to settle his body more comfortably in his clothes, and went into the hall to put on his overcoat before going out.  Here he was overtaken by a remonstrance from Wilkins.

“You aren’t going to the office, I hope, sir, until you’ve written those notes?”

Kemper stared at him silently an instant, one arm still in the sleeve of the overcoat he was putting on.

“Oh, I say, Wilkins, I’ll do them at the club,” he replied at last.

Wilkins shook his head with decision written in every line of his smooth-shaven English profile.  He was faithful, he was even affectionate, but he had been in Kemper’s service for fifteen years and he knew his man.

“You’d better get them off now, sir,” he urged in a persuasive voice, “it won’t take you a minute, and unless I post them myself, they are like to lie over.”

“Well, I suppose you’ll have your way with me, Wilkins,” remarked Kemper, as he withdrew his arm from his overcoat, which his servant promptly took from him.  “Most people do, you know.”  Then he turned back into his sitting-room and placing himself at his desk, took up his pen and accepted three invitations out of the round dozen he had to answer.  This accomplished, the discreet Wilkins gave him his hat and coat and permitted him to depart rapidly upon his way.

By eleven o’clock he was due at the office of the Confidential Life Insurance Company, of which he was one of the directors, and as he walked toward Broadway with his brisk and energetic step, he kept his mind closely upon the business affairs which were immediately before him.  This peculiar ability to concentrate his whole being upon a single instant, to apply himself with enthusiasm to the thing beneath his eyes, was the quality of all others which had worked most not only for his present worldly success, but for his personal happiness as well.  When he came out of his rooms the brief despondency of the morning had vanished as utterly as if it had never been, and until his wife’s name stared at him anew from a printed page, it was hardly probable that she would occur again to his thoughts.  A feeling of peace, of perfect charity pervaded his breast, and had he been asked on the spot for an expression of his religious creed, he would, perhaps, have answered without hesitation, “to live in pleasure and