His mind had never worked so brilliantly as it was working now.  The problems involved in his clients’ affairs were child’s play to him.  He took them apart and put them together again with a careless, confident, infallible perspicacity that amazed his colleagues and his opponents.  And, as Frank Crawford had pointed out, he took a savagely contemptuous pleasure in making those clients pay through the nose.

But he could look neither back at Rose, nor forward to her.  He could not, by any stretch of resolution, have nerved himself to the point of giving up that house that had nearly all his memories of her associated with it.  There hadn’t been a change of a single piece of furniture in it since she went away.  Her bedroom and her dressing-room were just as she had left them.  Her clothes were just as they had been left after the packing of that small trunk.  She might have been off spending a week-end somewhere.

The attitude couldn’t be kept up forever, he knew.  Some time or other he’d have to cross the next bridge; come to some more definite understanding with Rose than that inconclusive ridiculous scene there in Dubuque had left him with. (What a fool he had been that day!) There were the twins coming along.  For the present, their nurse (It wasn’t Mrs. Ruston.  He’d taken the first reasonable excuse for supplanting her.) and the pretty little snub-nosed nurse-maid Rose had liked, could supply their wants well enough.  But the time wasn’t so far ahead when they’d need a mother.  What would he do then; let Rose have them half the time and keep them half the time himself?  He’d read a perfectly beastly book once,—­he couldn’t remember the title of it—­about a child who had been brought up that way.  But, at all events, he needn’t do anything yet.

Meanwhile, it healed his lacerated pride to march along and keep the routine going.  It was with a perfectly immense relief that he snatched at the chance to buy the McCrea house, and by so doing make the permanency of his way of life a little more secure.  He could keep what he had, anyway.  And he could show the world, and Rose, that he wasn’t the broken frantic creature he knew she’d seen, and suspected it had glimpsed.  John Williamson’s explanation wasn’t altogether wrong.

Perhaps, had it been possible for Jimmy Wallace to tell him, just as he told Violet and John Williamson, how Rose’s voice “richened up as if the words tasted good to her,” when she mentioned the fact that she heard from her husband “regularly but not much,” he might have drawn the same favorable augury from it that Violet did.  But from her answering communications, though he drew comfort, he got no hope.

It was Rose herself who began this correspondence, within a month of her arrival in New York.  And Rodney, when he finished reading her letter, tore it to pieces and flung it into the fire, in a transport of disappointment and anger.  The sight of her writing on the envelope had brought his heart into his mouth, of course.  And when his shaking fingers had got it open and he saw that it indeed contained a letter from her, beginning “Dear Rodney,” and signed “Rose,” the wild surge of hope that swept over him actually turned him giddy, so that it was two or three minutes before he could read it.