of
her childish indiscretions with Wallace Hood. How had he managed it?

He hadn't been tactful. She acquitted him altogether of that. She
couldn't have endured tact this afternoon from anybody. Of course, the
mere expressiveness of his face helped a lot. The look he had turned on
Rush for example, that had stopped that nerve-racked boy in full career.
Or the look he gave her when he first learned of her father's illness.
That sudden coming back from whatever his own preoccupation might have
been to a vivid concern for her father.

Well, there, at last, it was. That was his quality. A genius for more
than forgetting himself, for stepping clean out of himself into some one
else's shoes. Wasn't that just a long way of saying imagination? He had
illuminated her father for her and in so doing had given her a ray of
real comfort. He had interpreted Paula--in terms how different from those
employed by Aunt Lucile! He had comprehended Rush without one momentary
flaw of resentment. Last of all, he had quite simply and without one
vitiating trace of self-pity, explained himself, luminously, so that it
was as if she had known him all her life.

One thing, to be sure, she didn't in the least understand--the very
last thing he had said. "That's why it was so incredible when you came
down the stairs instead." That had been to her, a complete non sequitur,
an enigma. But she was content to leave it at that.

Such a man, of course, could never--belong to anybody. He was not
collectable. There would always be about him, for everybody, some last
enigma, some room to which no one would be given the key. But there was a
virtue even in the fringe of him, the hem of his garment.

Was she getting sentimental? No, she was not. Indeed, precisely what his
little visit had done for her was to effect her release from a tangle of
taut-drawn sentimentalities. She hadn't felt as free as this, as
comfortable with herself, since she came home with Rush from New York.

She had no assurance that he'd come to the house again of his own accord
or that Paula would send for him. But she was in no mood to distress
herself just now, even with that possibility.

She crossed the room and got herself a cigarette, and with it alight she
returned to her contemplation of the piano keyboard. She didn't move nor
speak when she heard Rush come in but she kept an eye on the drawing-room
door and when presently he entered, she greeted him with a smile of
good-hu