What had he said in his note?  Recalling it as well as he could—­ for it was one, the last, of more than a dozen notes he had written in two hours of that evening—­recalling phrases he was pretty sure he had put into the one he had finally sent, in despair of a better, it seemed to him he had given her a wholly false impression—­an impression of her superiority and of his fear and awe.  That would never do.  He must set her right, must show her he was breaking the engagement only because she was not up to his standard.  Besides, he wished to see her again to make sure he had been victimized into an engagement by a purely physical, swiftly-evanescent imagining.  Yes, he must see her, must have a look at her, must have a talk with her.

“It’s the only decent, courageous thing to do in the circumstances.  Sending that note looked like cowardice—­would be cowardice if I didn’t follow it up with a visit.  And whatever else I am, surely I’m not a coward!”

Margaret had indulged in no masculine ingenuities of logic.  Woman-like, she had gone straight to the practical point:  Craig had written instead of coming—­he was, therefore, afraid of her.  Having written he had not fled, but had come—­he was, therefore, attracted by her still.  Obviously the game lay in her own hands, for what more could woman ask than that a man be both afraid and attracted?  A little management and she not only would save herself from the threatened humiliation of being jilted—­jilted by an uncouth nobody of a Josh Craig!—­but also would have him in durance, to punish his presumption at her own good pleasure as to time and manner.  If Joshua Craig, hardy plodder in the arduous pathway from plowboy to President, could have seen what was in the mind so delicately and so aristocratically entempled in that graceful, slender, ultra-feminine body of Margaret Severence’s, as she descended the stairs, putting fresh gloves upon her beautiful, idle hands, he would have borrowed wings of the wind and would have fled as from a gorgon.

But as she entered the room nothing could have seemed less formidable except to the heart.  Her spring dress—­she was wearing it for the first time—­was of a pale green, suggesting the draperies of islands of enchantment.  Its lines coincided with the lines of her figure.  Her hat, trimmed to match, formed a magic halo for her hair; and it, in turn, was the entrancing frame in which her small, quiet, pallid face was set—­that delicate, sensitive face, from which shone, now softly and now brilliantly, those hazel eyes a painter could have borrowed for a wood nymph.  In the doorway, before greeting him, she paused.

“Williams,” she called, and Craig was thrilled by her “high-bred” accent, that seemed to him to make of the English language a medium different from the one he used and heard out home.

“Yes, ma’am,” came the answer in the subtly-deferential tone of the aristocracy of menialdom, conjuring for Craig, with the aid of the woman herself and that aristocratic old room, a complete picture of the life of upper-class splendor.