Because he had always understood that young men in love found solace for their misery in solitude and in communion with nature, he at once drove his car to Lone Lake.  But his misery was quite genuine, and the emptiness of the brick house only served to increase his loneliness.  He had built the house for her, though she had never visited it, and was associated with it only through the somewhat indefinite medium of the telephone box.  But in New York they had been much together.  And Ainsley quickly decided that in revisiting those places where he had been happy in her company he would derive from the recollection some melancholy consolation.  He accordingly raced back through the night to the city; nor did he halt until he was at the door of her house.  She had left it only that morning, and though it was locked in darkness, it still spoke of her.  At least it seemed to bring her nearer to him than when he was listening to the frogs in the lake, and crushing his way through the pines.

He was not hungry, but he went to a restaurant where, when he was host, she had often been the honored guest, and he pretended they were at supper together and without a chaperon.  Either the illusion, or the supper cheered him, for he was encouraged to go on to his club.  There in the library, with the aid of an atlas, he worked out where, after thirteen hours of moving at the rate of twenty-two knots an hour, she should be at that moment.  Having determined that fact to his own satisfaction, he sent a wireless after the ship.  It read:  “It is now midnight and you are in latitude 40 deg. north, longitude 68 deg. west, and I have grown old and gray waiting for the sign.”

The next morning, and for many days after, he was surprised to find that the city went on as though she still were in it.  With unfeeling regularity the sun rose out of the East River.  On Broadway electric-light signs flashed, street-cars pursued each other, taxicabs bumped and skidded, women, and even men, dared to look happy, and had apparently taken some thought to their attire.  They did not respect even his widowerhood.  They smiled upon him, and asked him jocularly about the farm and his “crops,” and what he was doing in New York.  He pitied them, for obviously they were ignorant of the fact that in New York there were art galleries, shops, restaurants of great interest, owing to the fact that Polly Kirkland had visited them.  They did not know that on upper Fifth Avenue were houses of which she had deigned to approve, or which she had destroyed with ridicule, and that to walk that avenue and halt before each of these houses was an inestimable privilege.

Each day, with pathetic vigilance, Ainsley examined his heart for the promised sign.  But so far from telling him that the change he longed for had taken place, his heart grew heavier, and as weeks went by and no sign appeared, what little confidence he had once enjoyed passed with them.