seemed to become contaminated?

"There's no use staying any longer," she said. "Howard doesn't like it."

"I didn't say so," he interrupted. "There's something about the place
that grows on you. If I felt I could afford it--"

"At any rate," declared Honora, trying to control her voice, "I've
decided, now I've seen it a second time, that I don't want it. I only
wished him to look at it," she added, scornfully aware that she was
taking up the cudgels in his behalf. But she could not bring herself,
in Brent's presence, to declare that the argument of the rent seemed
decisive.

Her exasperation was somewhat increased by the expression on Trixton
Brent's face, which plainly declared that he deemed her last remarks to
be the quintessence of tactics; and he obstinately refused, as they went
down the stairs to the street, to regard the matter as closed.

"I'll take him down town in the Elevated," he said, as he put her into
the carriage. "The first round's a draw."

She directed the driver to the ferry again, and went back to Quicksands.
Several times during the day she was on the point of telephoning Brent
not to try to persuade Howard to rent the house, and once she even got
so far as to take down the receiver. But when she reflected, it seemed
an impossible thing to do. At four o'clock she herself was called to
the telephone by Mr. Cray, a confidential clerk in Howard's office, who
informed her that her husband had been obliged to leave town suddenly on
business, and would not be home that night.

"Didn't he say where he was going?" asked Honora.

"He didn't even tell me, Mrs. Spence," Cray replied, "and Mr. Dallam
doesn't know."

"Oh, dear," said Honora, "I hope he realizes that people are coming for
dinner to-morrow evening."

"I'm positive, from what he said, that he'll be back some time
to-morrow," Cray reassured her.

She refused an invitation to dine out, and retired shortly after her
own dinner with a novel so distracting that she gradually regained an
equable frame of mind. The uneasiness, the vague fear of the future,
wore away, and she slept peacefully. In the morning, however; she found
on her breakfast tray a note from Trixton Brent.

Her first feeling after reading it was one of relief that he had not
mentioned the house. He had written from a New York club, asking her to
lunch with him at Delmonico's that day and drive home in the motor. No
answer was required: if she did not appear at one o'clo