Nothing had changed there.  She closed her eyes and saw the little dining room in all the dignity of Sunday dinner, the big silver soup tureen catching the sun, the flowered china with the gilt edges, and even a glimpse of lace paper when the closet door opened; Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom, with Peter between them.  And these, strangely, were the only tangible things and immutable.

“You’ll give them—­a good account of me?” she said.  “I know that you do not care for New York,” she added with a smile.  “But it is possible to be happy here.”

“I am glad you are happy, Honora, and that you have got what you wanted in life.  Although I may be unreasonable and provincial and—­and Western,” he confessed with a twinkle—­for he had the characteristic national trait of shading off his most serious remarks—­“I have never gone so far as to declare that happiness was a question of locality.”

She laughed.

“Nor fame.”  Her mind returned to the loadstar.

“Oh, fame!” he exclaimed, with a touch of impatience, and he used the word that had possessed her all day.  “There is no reality in that.  Men are not loved for it.”

She set down her cup quickly.  He was looking at the water-colour.

“Have you been to the Metropolitan Museum lately?” he asked.

“The Metropolitan Museum?” she repeated in bewilderment.

“That would be one of the temptations of New York for me,” he said.  “I was there for half an hour this afternoon before I presented myself at your door as a suspicious character.  There is a picture there, by Coffin, called ‘The Rain,’ I believe.  I am very fond of it.  And looking at it on such a winter’s day as this brings back the summer.  The squall coming, and the sound of it in the trees, and the very smell of the wet meadow-grass in the wind.  Do you know it?”

“No,” replied Honora, and she was suddenly filled with shame at the thought that she had never been in the Museum.  “I didn’t know you were so fond of pictures.”

“I am beginning to be a rival of Mr. Dwyer,” he declared.  “I’ve bought four—­although I haven’t built my gallery.  When you come to St. Louis I’ll show them to you—­and let us hope it will be soon.”

For some time after she had heard the street door close behind him Honora remained where she was, staring into the fire, and then she crossed the room to a reading lamp, and turned it up.

Some one spoke in the doorway.

“Mr. Grainger, madam.”

Before she could rouse herself and recover from her astonishment, the gentleman himself appeared, blinking as though the vision of her were too bright to be steadily gazed at.  If the city had been searched, it is doubtful whether a more striking contrast to the man who had just left could have been found than Cecil Grainger in the braided, grey cutaway that clung to the semblance of a waist he still possessed.  In him Hyde Park and Fifth Avenue, so to speak, shook hands across the sea:  put him in either, and he would have appeared indigenous.