“If I can do anything——­”

“Pat will telephone.”  She was already halfway upstairs.

He found Pat in the front yard, and arranged with him to get news and to send messages by way of the drug store at the corner, so that she would know nothing about it.  He went to a florist’s in New York and sent masses of flowers.  And then—­there was nothing more to do.  He stopped in at the club and drank and gambled until far into the morning.  He fretted gloomily about all the next day, riding alone in the Park, driving with his sister, drinking and gambling at the club again and smiling cynically to himself at the covert glances his acquaintances exchanged.  He was growing used to those glances.  He cared not the flip of a penny for them.

On the third day came the funeral, and he went.  He did not let his cabman turn in behind the one carriage that followed the hearse.  At the graveyard he stood afar off, watching her in her simple new black, noting her calm.  She seemed thinner, but he thought it might be simply her black dress.  He could see no change in her face.  As she was leaving the grave, she looked in his direction but he was uncertain whether she had seen him.  Pat and Molly were in the big, gloomy looking carriage with her.

He ventured to go to the front gate an hour later.  Pat came out.  “It’s no use to go in, Mr. Norman,” he said.  “She’ll not see you.  She’s shut up in her own room.”

“Hasn’t she cried yet, Pat?”

“Not yet.  We’re waiting for it, sir.  We’re afraid her mind will give way.  At least, Molly is.  I don’t think so.  She’s a queer young lady—­as queer as she looks—­though at first you’d never think it.  She’s always looking different.  I never seen so many persons in one.”

“Can’t Molly make her cry?—­by talking about him?”

“She’s tried, sir.  It wasn’t no use.  Why, Miss Dorothy talks about him just as if he was still here.”  Pat wiped the sweat from his forehead.  “I’ve been in many a house of mourning, but never through such a strain as this.  Somehow I feel as if I’d never before been round where there was anyone that’d lost somebody they really cared about.  Weeping and moaning don’t amount to much beside what she’s doing.”

Norman stayed round for an hour or more, then rushed away distracted.  He drank like a madman—­drank himself into a daze, and so got a few hours of a kind of sleep.  He was looking haggard and wild now, and everyone avoided him, though in fact there was not the least danger of an outburst of temper.  His sister—­Josephine—­the office—­several clients telephoned for him.  To all he sent the same refusal—­that he was too ill to see anyone.  Not until the third day after the funeral did Dorothy telephone for him.

He took an ice-cold bath, got himself together as well as he could, and reached the house in Jersey City about half past three in the afternoon.  She came gliding into the room like a ghost, trailing a black negligee that made the whiteness of her skin startling.  Her eyelids were heavy and dark, but unreddened.  She gazed at him with calm, clear melancholy, and his heart throbbed and ached for her.  She seated herself, clasped her hands loosely in her lap, and said: