Ditmar stood staring after the trolley car that bore Janet away until it became a tiny speck of light in the distance.  Then he started to walk toward Hampton; in the unwonted exercise was an outlet for the pent-up energy her departure had thwarted; and presently his body was warm with a physical heat that found its counterpart in a delicious, emotional glow of anticipation, of exultant satisfaction.  After all, he could not expect to travel too fast with her.  Had he not at least gained a signal victory?  When he remembered her lips—­which she had indubitably given him!—­he increased his stride, and in what seemed an incredibly brief time he had recrossed the bridge, covered the long residential blocks of Warren Street, and gained his own door.

The house was quiet, the children having gone to bed, and he groped his way through the dark parlour to his den, turning on the electric switch, sinking into an armchair, and lighting a cigar.  He liked this room of his, which still retained something of that flavour of a refuge and sanctuary it had so eminently possessed in the now forgotten days of matrimonial conflict.  One of the few elements of agreement he had held in common with the late Mrs. Ditmar was a similarity of taste in household decoration, and they had gone together to a great emporium in Boston to choose the furniture and fittings.  The lamp in the centre of the table was a bronze column supporting a hemisphere of heavy red and emerald glass, the colours woven into an intricate and bizarre design, after the manner of the art nouveau—­so the zealous salesman had informed them.  Cora Ditmar, when exhibiting this lamp to admiring visitors, had remembered the phrase, though her pronunciation of it, according to the standard of the Sorbonne, left something to be desired.  The table and chairs, of heavy, shiny oak marvellously and precisely carved by machines, matched the big panels of the wainscot.  The windows were high in the wall, thus preventing any intrusion from the clothes-yard on which they looked.  The bookcases, protected by leaded panes, held countless volumes of the fiction from which Cora Ditmar had derived her knowledge of the great world outside of Hampton, together with certain sets she had bought, not only as ornaments, but with a praiseworthy view to future culture,—­such as Whitmarsh’s Library of the Best Literature.  These volumes, alas, were still uncut; but some of the pages of the novels—­if one cared to open them—­were stained with chocolate.  The steam radiator was a decoration in itself, the fireplace set in the red and yellow tiles that made the hearth.  Above the oak mantel, in a gold frame, was a large coloured print of a Magdalen, doubled up in grief, with a glory of loose, Titian hair, chosen by Ditmar himself as expressing the nearest possible artistic representation of his ideal of the female form.  Cora Ditmar’s objections on the score of voluptuousness and of insufficient clothing had been vain.  She had recognized no immorality