asure of reading it
again with Dan.

But after reading it once through, she did not wait for him before
reading it again and again. She did this with bewilderment, intershot
with flashes of conviction, and then doubts of this conviction. When she
could misunderstand no longer, she rose quietly and folded the letter,
and put it carefully back into its envelope and into her writing desk,
where she sat down and wrote, in her clearest and firmest hand, this
note to Mavering--

"I wish to see you immediately.

"ALICE PASMER."

XLIII

Dan had learned, with a lover's keenness, to read Alice's moods in the
most colourless wording of her notes. She was rather apt to write him
notes, taking back or reaffirming the effect of something that had just
passed between them. Her note were tempered to varying degrees of heat
and cold, so fine that no one else would have felt the difference, but
sensible to him in their subtlest intention.

Perhaps a mere witness of the fact would have been alarmed by a note
which began without an address, except that on the envelope, and ended
its peremptory brevity with the writer's name signed in full. Dan read
calamity in it, and he had all the more trouble to pull himself together
to meet it because he had parted with unusual tenderness from Alice
the night before, after an evening in which it seemed to him that their
ideals had been completely reconciled.

The note came, as her notes were apt to come, while Dan was at
breakfast, which he was rather luxurious about for so young a man, and
he felt formlessly glad afterward that he had drunk his first cup of
coffee before he opened it, for it chilled the second cup, and seemed to
take all character out of the omelet.

He obeyed it, wondering what the doom menaced in it might be, but
knowing that it was doom, and leaving his breakfast half-finished, with
a dull sense of the tragedy of doing so.

He would have liked to ask for Mrs. Pasmer first, and interpose a moment
of her cheerful unreality between himself and his interview with Alice,
but he decided that he had better not do this, and they met at once,
with the width of the room between them. Her look was one that made it
impassable to the simple impulse he usually had to take her in his arms
and kiss her. But as she stood holding out a letter to him, with the
apparent intention that he should come and take it, he traversed the
intervening space and took it.

"Why, it's from mot