A year ago those letters would have made her wildly happy; would have filled her with the confidence that the end she sought was in sight at last.  Now they drove her half mad with disappointment.  She never opened one of those dearly familiar envelopes without the irrepressible hope that it contained a love-letter; a passionate demand that she come back to him; leave all she had and come back to him; his woman to her man.  And her disappointment and inconsistency bewildered her.

Her two chance encounters, first with Jimmy Wallace in the theater, and later with James Randolph, made her restlessness more nearly unendurable.  The thought that they were going back to Chicago and would, no doubt, within a few days after their talks with her, see and talk with him, was like the cup of Tantalus.  And if she could encounter them by chance, like that, why mightn’t she encounter him?  Why mightn’t he come to New York on business?  She never walked anywhere, nowadays, without watching for him.

She didn’t yield, passively, to these thoughts and feelings.  She fought them relentlessly, methodically.  She went to a women’s gymnasium every evening, threw a medicine ball around for a while, and then played a hard game of squash, in the sometimes successful attempt to get tired enough so that she’d have to sleep.  Also she tried riding in the park, mornings, but that didn’t work so well, and she gave it up.

There came a Saturday morning, toward the end of May, which brought no letter from Rodney, and she stayed in all day, from one delivery to the next, waiting for it.  She tried to disguise her excitement over its failure to arrive, as a fear lest something might have gone wrong with him or with the twins, but did not succeed.  If anything had gone wrong she knew she’d have heard.  The thing that kept clutching at her heart was hope.  The hope that the letter wouldn’t come at all; that there’d be a telephone call instead—­and Rodney’s voice.

The telephone did ring just before noon, but the voice was Galbraith’s.  He wanted to know if she wouldn’t come over to his Long Island farm the following morning and spend the day.

She had visited the place two or three times and had always enjoyed it immensely there.  It wasn’t much of a farm, but there was a delightful old Revolutionary farmhouse on it, with ceilings seven feet high and casement windows, and the floors of all the rooms on different levels; and Galbraith, there, was always quite at his best.  His sister and her husband, whom he had brought over from England when he bought the place, ran it for him.  They were the simplest sort of peasant people who had hardly stirred from their little Surrey hamlet until that meteoric brother of theirs had summoned them on their breath-taking voyage to America, and for whom now, on this little Long Island farm, New York might have been almost as far away as London.  Mrs. Flaxman did all the work of the house and farmyard without the aid of a servant, and her husband raised vegetables for the New York market.