“It wasn’t that I didn’t believe——­” Mary crossed the dining-room and stood in the door.

“Yes, it was.  You thought I was with the old crowd.  I might as well go with them as to have you always thinking it.”

“I’m not always thinking it.”

“Yes, you are, too,” hotly.

“Barry—­please——­”

He stood uneasily at the foot of the stairs.  “You can’t understand how I feel.  If you were a boy——­”

She caught him up.  “If I were a boy?  Barry, if I were a boy I’d make the world move.  Oh, you | men, you have things all your own way, and you let it stand still——­”

She had raised her voice, and her words floating up and up reached the ears of Roger Poole, who appeared at the top of the stairway.

There was a moment’s startled silence, then Mary spoke.

“Barry, it is Mr. Poole.  You don’t know each other, do you?”

The two men, one going up the stairway, the other coming down, met and shook hands.  Then Barry muttered something about having to run away and dress, and Roger and Mary were left alone.

It was the first time that they had seen each other, since the night of the wedding.  They had arranged everything by telephone, and on the second short visit that Roger had made to his rooms, Susan Jenks had looked after him.

It seemed to Roger now that, like the house, Mary had taken on a new and less radiant aspect.  She looked pale and tired.  Her dress of white with its narrow edge of dark fur made her taller and older.  Her fair waved hair was parted at the side and dressed compactly without ornament or ribbon.  He was again, however, impressed by the almost frank boyishness of her manner as she said: 

“I want you to meet Aunt Isabella.  She can’t hear very well, so you’ll have to raise your voice.”

As they went in together, Mary was forced to readjust certain opinions which she had formed of her lodger.  The other night he had been divorced from the dapper youths of her own set by his lack of up-to-dateness, his melancholy, his air of mystery.

But to-night he wore a loose coat which she recognized at once as good style.  His dark hair which had hung in an untidy lock was brushed back as smoothly and as sleekly as Gordon Richardson’s.  His dark eyes had a waked-up look.  And there was a hint of color in his clean-shaven olive cheeks.

“I came down,” he told her as he walked beside her, “to thank you for the coffee, for the hyacinths; for the fire, for the—­welcome that my room gave me.”

“Oh, did you like it?  We were very busy up there all the morning, Aunt Isabelle and I and Susan Jenks.”

“I felt like thanking Susan Jenks for the big bath towels; they seemed to add the final perfect touch.”

She laughed and repeated his remark to Aunt Isabelle.

“Think of his being grateful for bath towels, Aunt Isabelle.”