e would have dined earlier; only herself and her husband
were to be present. It was to be her birthday dinner. All the noisy,
clamourous world should be excluded; no faintest rumble of the Pit
would intrude. She would have him all to herself. He would, so she
determined, forget everything else in his love for her. She would be
beautiful as never before--brilliant, resistless, and dazzling. She
would have him at her feet, her own, her own again, as much her own as
her very hands. And before she would let him go he would forever and
forever have abjured the Battle of the Street that had so often caught
him from her. The Pit should not have him; the sweep of that great
whirlpool should never again prevail against the power of love.

Yes, she had suffered, she had known the humiliation of a woman
neglected. But it was to end now; her pride would never again be
lowered, her love never again be ignored.

But the afternoon passed and evening drew on without any word from him.
In spite of her anxiety, she yet murmured over and over again as she
paced the floor of her room, listening for the ringing of the door bell:

"He will send word, he will send word. I know he will."

By four o'clock she had begun to dress. Never had she made a toilet
more superb, more careful. She disdained a "costume" on this great
evening. It was not to be "Theodora" now, nor "Juliet," nor "Carmen."
It was to be only Laura Jadwin--just herself, unaided by theatricals,
unadorned by tinsel. But it seemed consistent none the less to choose
her most beautiful gown for the occasion, to panoply herself in every
charm that was her own. Her dress, that closely sheathed the low, flat
curves of her body and that left her slender arms and neck bare, was
one shimmer of black scales, iridescent, undulating with light to her
every movement. In the coils and masses of her black hair she fixed her
two great cabochons of pearls, and clasped about her neck her
palm-broad collaret of pearls and diamonds. Against one shoulder nodded
a bunch of Jacqueminots, royal red, imperial.

It was hard upon six o'clock when at last she dismissed her maid. Left
alone, she stood for a moment in front of her long mirror that
reflected her image from head to foot, and at the sight she could not
forbear a smile and a sudden proud lifting of her head. All the woman
in her preened and plumed herself in the consciousness of the power of
her beauty. Let the Battle of the Street clamour nev