Mrs. Hambleton Durrett went her way, and Mr. Durrett his.  The less said about Mr. Durrett’s way—­even in this suddenly advanced age—­the better.  As for Nancy, she seemed to the distant eye to be walking through life in a stately and triumphant manner.  I read in the newspapers of her doings, her comings and goings; sometimes she was away for months together, often abroad; and when she was at home I saw her, but infrequently, under conditions more or less formal.  Not that she was formal,—­or I:  our intercourse seemed eloquent of an intimacy in a tantalizing state of suspense.  Would that intimacy ever be renewed?  This was a question on which I sometimes speculated.  The situation that had suspended or put an end to it, as the case might be, was never referred to by either of us.

One afternoon in the late winter of the year following that in which we had given a dinner to the Scherers (where the Durretts had rather marvellously appeared together) I left my office about three o’clock—­a most unusual occurrence.  I was restless, unable to fix my mind on my work, filled with unsatisfied yearnings the object of which I sought to keep vague, and yet I directed my steps westward along Boyne Street until I came to the Art Museum, where a loan exhibition was being held.  I entered, bought a catalogue, and presently found myself standing before number 103, designated as a portrait of Mrs. Hambleton Durrett,—­painted in Paris the autumn before by a Polish artist then much in vogue, Stanislaus Czesky.  Nancy—­was it Nancy?—­was standing facing me, tall, superb in the maturity of her beauty, with one hand resting on an antique table, a smile upon her lips, a gentle mockery in her eyes as though laughing at the world she adorned.  With the smile and the mockery—­somehow significant, too, of an achieved inaccessibility—­went the sheen of her clinging gown and the glint of the heavy pearls drooping from her high throat to her waist.  These caught the eye, but failed at length to hold it, for even as I looked the smile faded, the mockery turned to wistfulness.  So I thought, and looked again—­to see the wistfulness:  the smile had gone, the pearls seemed heavier.  Was it a trick of the artist? had he seen what I saw, or thought I saw? or was it that imagination which by now I might have learned to suspect and distrust.  Wild longings took possession of me, for the portrait had seemed to emphasize at once how distant now she was from me, and yet how near!  I wanted to put that nearness to the test.  Had she really changed? did anyone really change? and had I not been a fool to accept the presentment she had given me?  I remembered those moments when our glances had met as across barriers in flashes of understanding.  After all, the barriers were mere relics of the superstition of the past.  What if I went to her now?  I felt that I needed her as I never had needed anyone in all my life....  I was aroused by the sound of lowered voices beside me.