touch of Lucile.  It was the talk of the town, and many things were said, and a few were done.  I was silent and hopeful.  My triumph was near!  She had done with him, and forever.  He did not cut his handsome throat!  He did not do any of the thrilling but uncomfortable things done by the usual rejected lover in the average novel—­but he came back to me! Once more Gerome Meadows was my recognized lover, and the people—­the fickle people—­began to whisper it about (greatly to my satisfaction), that perhaps this very uncertain Mr. Meadows had always loved me from the time his sister Kate and myself were school-girls together.  And furthermore, he had for a while yielded to the manifold fascinations of that devilish brown-eyed beauty.  In fact, he himself told me a goodly number of just such little speeches; discoursed on the difference between real love and mere fascination.  He told me that I was the only woman he ever could really love, and that he had for me a pure and warm affection.  Ah! how sweet were those declarations to my ear.  But not to my heart—­it was closed against him.

I was not the woman he had known and halfway loved before—­for I had eagerly tasted deep and long of the Egyptian flesh-pots, and I refused any other kind of social sustenance.  I allowed him to believe that his tardy return had routed all rivals from the field.  I forced him to fancy me to be so different from that other woman.  I was, in truth, a cool, quiet reaction.  I coaxed him into believing me to be full of a gentle, womanly purity.  I made him blind to the fact that I was a worldly woman, conscious of and ready to unhesitatingly use my worldliness.  I measured my powers aright—­I could at my own sweet will allow him, force him, coax him, make him do any thing.  I cunningly wove a web in and around the heart of Gerome Meadows—­his rejected, torn and dejected heart.  I gently soothed him into not quite a forgetfulness, yet a strong and healthful calm.  He was grateful.  Reactions are always dangerous; he wondered why he had not known me before as he knew me then.  And while he wondered I charmed him into a new love fever.  It was almost a touch of real passion.  It was a skillful drawing together of the scattered ligaments of that other and violently broken love.  I had labored hard, and not altogether in vain.  He was mine for the taking.  Would I take him?

We stood together late one afternoon in a rich oriel window which overhung the street.  We were silent.  The rustle of the light summer drapery filled the air with a faint but melodiously tender undertone.  We looked out of the broad open window down the street.  It was near the close of a superb summer’s day.  I was in a mood to yield.  My old nature seemed to rise out of its former self.  It was the one golden opportunity for the man by my side.  The old tender leaning toward him came back again, stronger, more subtle than ever before.  It was—­for the while—­love, or something very like