“Stephen can’t shake his wife, I suppose?” he asked presently.

“Not—­not according to the New York law, I believe,” Susan said.

“Well—­that’s a case where virtue is its own reward,—­not,” said Kenneth.  “And he—­he cares, does he?” he asked, with shy interest.

A rush of burning color, and the light in Susan’s eyes, were her only answer.

“Shucks, what a rotten shame!” Kenneth said regretfully.  “So he goes away to Japan, does he?  Lord, what a shame—–­”

Susan really thought he was thinking more of her heart-affair than his own, when she finally left him.  Kenneth was heartily interested in the ill-starred romance.  He bade her good-night with real affection and sympathy.

Susan stood bewildered for a moment, outside the door, listening to the subdued murmurs that came up from the house, blinking, after the bright glow of Kenneth’s lamps, in the darkness of the hall.  Presently she crossed to a wide window that faced across the village, toward the hills.  It was closed; the heavy glass gave back only a dim reflection of herself, bare-armed, bare-throated, with spangles winking dully on her scarf.

She opened the window and the sweet cold night air came in with a rush, and touched her hot cheeks and aching head with an infinite coolness.  Susan knelt down and drank deep of it, raised her eyes to the silent circle of the hills, the starry arch of the sky.

There was no moon, but Tamalpais’ great shoulder was dimly outlined against darker blackness, and moving, twinkling dots showed where ferryboats were crossing and recrossing the distant bay.  San Francisco’s lights glittered like a chain of gems, but San Rafael, except for a half-concealed household light, here and there under the trees, was in darkness.  Faint echoes of dance-music came from the hotel, the insistent, throbbing bass of a waltz; Susan shuddered at the thought of it; the crowd and the heat, the laughing and flirting, the eating and drinking.  Her eyes searched the blackness between the stars;—­oh, to plunge into those infinite deeps, to breathe the untainted air of those limitless great spaces!

Garden odors, wet and sweet, came up to her; she got the exquisite breath of drenched violets, of pinetrees.  Susan thought of her mother’s little garden, years ago, of the sunken stone ale-bottles that framed the beds, of alyssum and marigolds and wall-flowers and hollyhocks growing all together.  She remembered her little self, teasing for heart-shaped cookies, or gravely attentive to the bargain driven between her mother and the old Chinese vegetable-vendor, with his loaded, swinging baskets.  It went dimly through Susan’s mind that she had grown too far away from the good warm earth.  It was years since she had had the smell of it and the touch of it, or had lain down in its long grasses.  At her aunt’s house, in the office, and here, it seemed so far away!  Susan had a hazy vision of some sensible linen gardening dresses—­of herself out in the spring sunshine, digging, watering, getting happier and dirtier and hotter every minute—–­