When at length I reached my room at the Club I sat looking out at the rain falling on the shining pavements under the arc-lights.  Though waves of heat caused by some sudden recollection or impatient longing still ran through my body, a saner joy of anticipation was succeeding emotional tumult, and I reflected that Nancy had been right in insisting that we walk circumspectly in spite of passion.  After all, I had outwitted circumstance, I had gained the prize, I could afford to wait a little.  We should talk it over to-morrow,—­no, to-day.  The luminous face of the city hall clock reminded me that midnight was long past....

I awoke with the consciousness of a new joy, suddenly to identify it with Nancy.  She was mine!  I kept repeating it as I dressed; summoning her, not as she had lain in my arms in the darkness—­though the intoxicating sweetness of that pervaded me—­but as she had been before the completeness of her surrender, dainty, surrounded by things expressing an elusive, uniquely feminine personality.  I could afford to smile at the weather, at the obsidian sky, at the rain still falling persistently; and yet, as I ate my breakfast, I felt a certain impatience to verify what I knew was a certainty, and hurried to the telephone booth.  I resented the instrument, its possibilities of betrayal, her voice sounded so matter-of-fact as she bade me good morning and deplored the rain.

“I’ll be out as soon as I can get away,” I said.  “I have a meeting at three, but it should be over at four.”  And then I added irresistibly:  “Nancy, you’re not sorry?  You—­you still—?”

“Yes, don’t be foolish,” I heard her reply, and this time the telephone did not completely disguise the note for which I strained.  I said something more, but the circuit was closed....

I shall not attempt to recount the details of our intercourse during the week that followed.  There were moments of stress and strain when it seemed to me that we could not wait, moments that strengthened Nancy’s resolution to leave immediately for the East:  there were other, calmer periods when the wisdom of her going appealed to me, since our ultimate union would be hastened thereby.  We overcame by degrees the distastefulness of the discussion of ways and means....  We spent an unforgettable Sunday among the distant high hills, beside a little lake of our own discovery, its glinting waters sapphire and chrysoprase.  A grassy wood road, at the inviting entrance to which we left the automobile, led down through an undergrowth of laurel to a pebbly shore, and there we lunched; there we lingered through the long summer afternoon, Nancy with her back against a tree, I with my head in her lap gazing up at filmy clouds drifting imperceptibly across the sky, listening to the droning notes of the bees, notes that sometimes rose in a sharp crescendo, and again were suddenly hushed.  The smell of the wood-mould mingled with the fainter scents of wild flowers.  She had brought