Constancy and fixedness belong to strong characters.  The granite crag stands unchanging, but the waters at its base lash themselves into a thousand shapes and colors and semblances.  Hamilton had in him the firmness of the hills, but Paul’s nature was as fluid as the waters that whirl or lilt along the easiest channels, and that turn aside to avoid obstacles.  On his table stood a photograph of Loraine Haswell in a gold frame.  It was a photograph of which there was no duplicate, and one which her husband had not seen.  When it had been taken the sitter had selected a pose of graceful ease, as though the photographer had ambushed her and caught her in a moment of almost sacred privacy, a moment when she had relaxed into an attitude of intimate and somewhat melancholy thought.

The slender hands rested with fingers loosely interlocked in her lap, holding a drooping rose.  The splendid slenderness of her figure was enhanced by the veiling of delicate negligee, and the face under its night-dark profusion of hair looked out wistfully with a sad half-smile on something that her heart chose to hold before her gaze.  Certainly, had it not been that such excellence of the photographer’s craft could only have been attained by careful posing, one might have said that he had taken an unfair advantage and had permitted his lens to spy upon a lovely lady in the secrecy of her boudoir, whose sole companions were emotions which must remain locked in her beautiful breast.

She had told Paul when she gave him the picture, and the same ghost of pathos had flickered into her eyes and the droop of her lips, that the flower was one from a box of his giving, and that she had been thinking of him when the camera clicked, forgetting for a moment the pose she had meant to assume.  Often, she whispered, she sat like that thinking of him.

So Paul kept flowers on each side of the frame, and made of it a sort of shrine.

And yet, sometimes, when he had said good-bye to her after a luncheon or tea together, he would turn his car southward and find himself driving down the avenue to Washington square and the old house on the south side, to invite Marcia Terroll for a spin beside him.  And sometimes he would call her on the telephone and they would meet for a walk.

To himself alone, he confessed his love for Loraine, for a specter of timidity rose often and marred their meetings.  How was it to end?  He could no more escape the realization of the husband’s existence and possible ire than can the quail in the open grain-field forget the shadow of a soaring hawk.  And Paul was not the most daring cock quail in the stubble.  He saw shadows of proprietary wings where the sky held only wisps of fleecy cloud.

With Marcia, there was the security of safe companionship, and a combination of stimulus and soothing.

That this interest was tinctured with an essence of the enthusiastic, which to other eyes than his own—­even to her eyes—­might seem to hold a stronger personal note, he did not admit to himself.  That would have meant another complication and a fresh alarm, so if the idea came he laughed it away as preposterous.  But in a fashion those were very good days.  He was discovering New York.