“If I like!” he repeated.

But she was on the sidewalk, following the bell boy into the cool, marble-lined area of the hotel.  A smiling clerk handed her a pen, and set the new universe to rocking.

“Mrs. Leffingwell, I presume?  We have your telegram.”

Mrs. Leffingwell!  Who was that person?  For an instant she stood blankly holding the pen, and then she wrote rapidly, if a trifle unsteadily:  “Mrs. Leffingwell and maid.”  A pause.  Where was her home?  Then she added the words, “St. Louis.”

Her rooms were above the narrow canon of the side street, looking over the roofs of the inevitable brownstone fronts opposite.  While Mathilde, in the adjoining chamber, unpacked her bag, Honora stood gazing out of the sitting-room windows, trying to collect her thoughts.  Her spirits had unaccountably fallen, the sense of homelessness that had pursued her all these months overtaken her once more.  Never, never, she told herself, would she enter a hotel again alone; and when at last he came she clung to him with a passion that thrilled him the more because he could not understand it.

“Hugh—­you will care for me?” she cried.

He kissed away her tears.  He could not follow her; he only knew that what he held to him was a woman such as he had never known before.  Tender, and again strangely and fiercely tender:  an instrument of such miraculous delicacy as to respond, quivering, to the lightest touch; an harmonious and perfect blending of strength and weakness, of joy and sorrow,—­of all the warring elements in the world.  What he felt was the supreme masculine joy of possession.

At last they sat down on either side of the white cloth the waiter had laid, for even the gods must eat.  Not that our deified mortals ate much on this occasion.  Vesta presided once more, and after the feast was over gently led them down the slopes until certain practical affairs began to take shape in the mind of the man.  Presently he looked at his watch, and then at the woman, and made a suggestion.

“Marry you now—­this of afternoon!” she cried, aghast.  “Hugh, are you in your right senses?”

“Yes,” he said, “I’m reasonable for the first time in my life.”

She laughed, and immediately became serious.  But when she sought to marshal her arguments, she found that they had fled.

“Oh, but I couldn’t,” she answered.  “And besides, there are so many things I ought to do.  I—­I haven’t any clothes.”

But this was a plea he could not be expected to recognize.  He saw no reason why she could not buy as many as she wanted after the ceremony.

“Is that all?” he demanded.

“No—­that isn’t all.  Can’t you see that—­that we ought to wait, Hugh?”

“No,” he exclaimed, “No I can’t see it.  I can only see that every moment of waiting would be a misery for us both.  I can only see that the situation, as it is to-day, is an intolerable one for you.”