uld read in her face also the record of the
strange agitation that had evidenced itself at the door. Her spirit too
was in equinox. The lips I knew so well, though only in one expression,
were now grave and a little drawn, and her eyes held a wild questioning,
as though my coming brought a startling riddle.

In a moment she was again the perfectly poised mistress of herself. She
came over and offered her hand and as I took it she met my eyes smiling,
though she must have read in them the rising hunger of a man for a
woman--a hunger which in me was so poignant that my soul was the soul
of a wolf. The touch of her fingers electrified me and the tremor of my
own hand, before I withdrew it, must have telegraphed whatever my pupils
failed to mirror.

That wordless message told her how my sanity reeled on the brink of
seizing her and holding her in wild defiance of this man, across the
room, whose name she bore.

"I won't interrupt business," she was saying with perfect serenity. "But
later I hope to see you again."

I bowed. "I hope so," I answered politely, while a wave of anger swept
me.

She would not interrupt! She who had snapped all the thread of life and
let my soul go plunging down the abysses.

She would not interrupt!

The grandfather clock against the wall stood at nine twenty-four. At
nine twenty I had been stolidly puffing one of Weighborne's Havanas and
listening to his disquisitions on courts of appeals decisions and
squatters' rights. The cigar which I had dropped on an ash-tray at the
first sound of her voice still held its ash and sent up a thin spiral of
smoke. It had outlived me.

My host plunged afresh into his papers. He might as well have been
reading me ukases from the Romonoff Czar in the undiluted Russian. But
as the clock ticked off the half-hour I seemed to freeze out of the
eruptive and into the glacial stage. I felt my lips drawing into a stiff
smile. I even contrived to nod my head in sedulous and ape-like
agreement when he raised interrogative eyes to mine. So rapidly had my
volcanic lava of spirit hardened to clinkers that when the telephone
called him to a barn, where some accident had befallen a thoroughbred
colt, I was able to turn a conventionally masklike countenance on
Frances, who came to chat with me till his return. She sat in a great
leather chair, and I, standing on the hearth, looked down on her, braced
for whatever might develop. I was resolved to make amends for my
se