Suddenly an idea of escape struck Paul, as it had struck him at the school.  He, too, laughed, turning to Loraine.  “And since you are in better hands, I’ll run along.  I have an appointment at a studio on the square.”

Len Haswell favored him with a satirical glance.  “You seem,” he suggested coolly, “to be only beginning your meal.  We are here on business, and won’t interrupt.”  The big man turned on his heel, and, followed by his companion, went into the adjoining dining-room.  Loraine Haswell laughed nervously, but Paul’s face clouded with deep anxiety.

After he had put Loraine into a taxi’ the cloud deepened.  The same self-accusations that had tortured his childhood with the suffering of self-contempt after each act of cowardice had him again by the throat.  Never had it been his plan to urge this woman toward divorce.  He had simply drifted with pleasant tides and now he found himself washed seaward with a dragging anchor.  It was small compensation to reflect that his fault was less vicious than craven.

The square was bathed in a radiance of frosty sunlight, and the buildings at the south stood diamond-clear under a flawless sky.  The monument to the man whose courage and decision had cradled a nation’s birth gleamed in its granite whiteness.  But Paul Burton felt small, afraid and besmirched of soul.  He hurried to his own house and shut himself in with a thousand weak misgivings, until finally an idea formulated itself.  He would go to Hamilton for counsel and strength.

* * * * *

As far as the clean sweep of mountain winds differ from the suffocation of a miasma, so far did the thoughts of Mary Burton differ from those of Paul that afternoon.

She and Jefferson Edwardes had been riding in the park, and though their horses had only cantered their hearts had ridden madly and on winged steeds.  Now, with twilight stealing in and softly blotting out the angles of the room, they sat together, still in saddle-togs, before the great, carven mantel which Hamilton had brought back from a European castle where once Napoleon passed a night.  A brave glare from roaring logs of driftwood cheerily flooded with light the hearth and the huge polar bear skin stretched before it.  Mary Burton sat in a big chair, also castle-ravished, which swallowed her like a cavern, and as Jefferson Edwardes knelt on the rug beside her, and watched the flames caress into gorgeous vividness the color of her eyes and lips and cheeks and hair, it pleased him to think of her as seated on a throne, and of himself as at her feet.

They had no light but the firelight and needed none, for they had captured the brightness and joyousness and warmth of June and meant to carry it with them wheresoever they went and through all the meaner months.

Mary’s right hand was still gloved, but the left was bare and she kept turning it this way and that, watching with engrossed fascination a diamond on one finger that caught and splintered the firelight.  It was the jewel which proclaimed that Mary Burton was to be Mary Edwardes.