“Let Chadwick do it, anyway, Jim.  Shall I tell Ellie to send him up at eight?”

“If you will.  Thank you!  Good-night!”

“Good-night!” And Julia trailed her satins and laces slowly upstairs, unfastening her jewels as she went.  A little sense of discouragement was fighting for possession; she fought it consciously as she had fought such waves of despondency a hundred times before.  She propped herself comfortably in pillows, turned on a light, and began to read.

Ellie fussed about the room for a few minutes, and then was gone.  The big house was very still.  Eleven o’clock struck from the little mahogany clock on her mantel, midnight struck, and still Jim’s footstep did not come up the stairs, and there was no welcome sound of occupancy in the room adjoining her own.

Suddenly terror smote Julia; she flung her book aside and sat up erect in bed.  Her heart was thundering with fear; the silence of the house was like that that follows an explosion.

For a few dreadful seconds she sat motionless; then she thrust her bare feet in the slippers of warm white fox that Ellie had put out, and caught up a Japanese robe of black crepe, in which her figure was quite lost.  Fastening the wide obi with trembling fingers, she slipped out into the hall, dimly lighted and very still.  Then she ran quickly downstairs.

What sight of horror she expected to find in the library she did not know, but the shock of revulsion, when the opened door showed her nothing more terrible than Jim, musing in the firelight, was almost as bad as a fright could have been.

“Oh, Jim!” she panted, coming in, one hand pressed against her heart, “I thought something—­I got frightened!”

Jim looked up with his old, tender, whimsical smile, the smile for which she had hungered so long, and held out a reassuring hand.

“Why, no, you poor kid!” he said.  “I’ve been sitting right here!”

“I thought—­and it was so still—­and you didn’t come up!” Julia said, beginning to sob.  And in a moment she was in his arms, clinging to him in an ecstasy of love and relief.  For a long blissful time they remained so, the soft curve of Julia’s cheek against Jim’s face, her heart beating quick above his own, her warm little figure, in its loose, soft robe, gathered closely to him.

“Feeling better now, old lady?”

“Oh, fine!” But Julia’s face quivered with tears again at the tone.

“Well, then, what’s this for?” He showed her a drop on the back of his hand.

“Be—­because I love you so, Jim!”

“Well, you needn’t cry over it!” said Jim gently.  “I’m the one that ought to do the crying, Judy,” he added, with a significant glance at her lovely flushed face and tear-bright blue eyes.

Julia leaned against him with a long, happy sigh.

“Oh, I’m so glad I came down!” she breathed contentedly.

“‘Glad!’” Jim echoed soberly.  “God!  You don’t know what it meant to me to look up and see my little Geisha coming in.  I was going crazy, I think!”