“I shall come and see Flora before I go West.  But I am going to be married first.  We both have a feeling that it must be now—­that something might happen if we put it off, and nothing must happen.  I love him too much.  Of course you won’t believe that.  I can hardly believe it myself.  But I have someone to climb the heights with me, Georgie, and we shall ascend to the peak—­together.”

For a wedding present George sent Madge the pendant he had bought for Becky.  To connect it up with Madge’s favorite color scheme, he had an amethyst put in place of the sapphire.  He was glad to give it away.  Every time he had come upon it, it had reminded him of things that he wished to forget.

Yet he could not forget.  Even as Becky had thought of him, he had thought of her; of her radiant youth on the morning that Randy had arrived; at the Horse Show in her shabby shoes and sailor hat; in the Bird Room in pale blue under the swinging lamp; in the music room between tall candles; in the garden, with a star shining into the still pool; that last night, on the balcony, leaning over, with a yellow lantern like a halo behind her.

There were other things that he thought of—­of Randy, in khaki on the station platform; Randy, lean and tall among the boarders; Randy, left behind with Kemp in the rain; Randy, debonair and insolent, announcing his engagement on the terrace at Hamilton Hill; Randy, a shadow against a silver sky, answering Becky’s call; Randy, in the dark by the fountain, with muscles like iron, forcing him inevitably back, lifting him above the basin, letting him drop——­; Randy, the Conqueror, marching away with Becky’s fan as his trophy——!

New York was, of course, at this season of the year, a pageant of sparkling crowds, and of brilliant window displays, of new productions at the theaters.  People were coming back to town.  Even the fashionable folk were running down to taste the elixir of the early days in the metropolis.

But George found everything flat and stale.  He did the things he had always done, hunted up the friends he had always known.  He spent weekends at various country places, and came always back to town with an undiminished sense of his need of Becky, and his need of revenge on Randy.

He had heard before he left Virginia that Becky was at Nantucket.  He had found some consolation in the fact that she was not at Huntersfield.  To have thought of her with Randy in the old garden, on Pavilion Hill, in the Bird Room, would have been unbearable.

He had a feeling that, in a sense, Madge’s marriage was a desertion.  He did not in the least want to marry her, but there were moments when he needed her friendship very much.  He needed it now.  And she was going to marry Major Prime, and go out to some God-forsaken place, and get fat and lose her beauty.  He wished that she would not talk about such things—­it made him feel old, and worried about his waist-line.