retion became deception as time passed, and every day was adding to
its sum. Sometimes I could forget the vital fact. Sometimes at night
in my room, sitting with my book at my side neglected, I would stare
vacantly at the wall and treat myself to a feast of dreams, contentedly
munch the most delicate morsels of the past and present. And by right
of that past and present it was almost fore-ordained that Penelope and
I were to go down the years together. Then I would remember. I would
start from my chair with a despairing laugh and pace up and down my
narrow room, restless and unhappy. I knew that I could not long delay
revealing to Penelope the paramount fact, and in revealing it to her I
seemed to say that after all she was only a casual friend, that all my
life's interest was bound up in Gladys Todd, and my life's ambition
expressed in a room with an easel by the window, a bird's-eye-maple
mantel, and around the walls a rack for odd lots of china and
black-framed prints. It was hard to tell her that, but I knew that I
must, and I said that I should talk freely as in the old days of
brotherly confidence, as though of all others she would be happiest in
hearing of my good fortune. With my mind made up to face boldly this
bad situation, I could not crush the consoling hope that in hearing she
would give some sign of the pain of the wound that I was making. What
a fatuous illusion! In her presence, in an environment which made that
which I planned for myself seem so narrow and commonplace, she became a
spirit thoroughly alien. I could as easily have talked to some foreign
princess of the blood of Mr. Pound or Stacy Shunk. I could as easily
have announced to Mrs. Bannister that I was engaged to Gladys Todd.
And I must have gone away, fled ignominiously after one cup of tea, had
not Penelope, with a sudden impatient movement, turned her chair and
leaned forward with her chin cupped in her hands, as she used to sit in
the old days on the back steps, with her eyes fixed on mine.

"David," she said, "did you really come here to talk to me about the
weather or to tell me things I really want to know--of Mr. Pound, of
Miss Spinner and Stacy Shunk. Who drives the stage now?"

I was on the edge of the divan, my hands playing an imaginary game of
cat's-cradle when she spoke, and now I pushed back into the comfortable
depths and stared at her in surprise. I was amazed at hearing this
princess of the blood descend to an