the balance sheet before him
were hopping about like black imps in an infernal forward-and-back,
that the picture hung there so persistently. It was a long time since he
had wanted anything as much as, at that particular moment, he wanted to
be with Clare and hear her voice; and as soon as he had ground out the
day's measure of work he rang up the Van Degen palace and learned that
she was still in town.

The lowered awnings of her inner drawing-room cast a luminous shadow on
old cabinets and consoles, and on the pale flowers scattered here and
there in vases of bronze and porcelain. Clare's taste was as capricious
as her moods, and the rest of the house was not in harmony with this
room. There was, in particular, another drawing-room, which she now
described as Peter's creation, but which Ralph knew to be partly hers: a
heavily decorated apartment, where Popple's portrait of her throned over
a waste of gilt furniture. It was characteristic that to-day she had
had Ralph shown in by another way; and that, as she had spared him the
polyphonic drawing-room, so she had skilfully adapted her own appearance
to her soberer background. She sat near the window, reading, in a clear
cool dress: and at his entrance she merely slipped a finger between the
pages and looked up at him.

Her way of receiving him made him feel that restlessness and stridency
were as unlike her genuine self as the gilded drawing-room, and that
this quiet creature was the only real Clare, the Clare who had once been
so nearly his, and who seemed to want him to know that she had never
wholly been any one else's.

"Why didn't you let me know you were still in town?" he asked, as he sat
down in the sofa-corner near her chair.

Her dark smile deepened. "I hoped you'd come and see."

"One never knows, with you."

He was looking about the room with a kind of confused pleasure in its
pale shadows and spots of dark rich colour. The old lacquer screen
behind Clare's head looked like a lustreless black pool with gold leaves
floating on it; and another piece, a little table at her elbow, had the
brown bloom and the pear-like curves of an old violin.

"I like to be here," Ralph said.

She did not make the mistake of asking: "Then why do you never come?"
Instead, she turned away and drew an inner curtain across the window to
shut out the sunlight which was beginning to slant in under the awning.

The mere fact of her not answering, and the final touch of well-