fferts and a young Chivers.

A mean desire not to have Madame Olenska seen at the Beauforts' door
vanished as he felt the penetrating warmth of her hand.

"I shall see you now--we shall be together," he broke out, hardly
knowing what he said.

"Ah," she answered, "Granny has told you?"

While he watched her he was aware that Lefferts and Chivers, on
reaching the farther side of the street corner, had discreetly struck
away across Fifth Avenue. It was the kind of masculine solidarity that
he himself often practised; now he sickened at their connivance. Did
she really imagine that he and she could live like this? And if not,
what else did she imagine?

"Tomorrow I must see you--somewhere where we can be alone," he said, in
a voice that sounded almost angry to his own ears.

She wavered, and moved toward the carriage.

"But I shall be at Granny's--for the present that is," she added, as if
conscious that her change of plans required some explanation.

"Somewhere where we can be alone," he insisted.

She gave a faint laugh that grated on him.

"In New York? But there are no churches ... no monuments."

"There's the Art Museum--in the Park," he explained, as she looked
puzzled. "At half-past two. I shall be at the door ..."

She turned away without answering and got quickly into the carriage.
As it drove off she leaned forward, and he thought she waved her hand
in the obscurity. He stared after her in a turmoil of contradictory
feelings. It seemed to him that he had been speaking not to the woman
he loved but to another, a woman he was indebted to for pleasures
already wearied of: it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this
hackneyed vocabulary.

"She'll come!" he said to himself, almost contemptuously.

Avoiding the popular "Wolfe collection," whose anecdotic canvases
filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron
and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum, they had wandered
down a passage to the room where the "Cesnola antiquities" mouldered in
unvisited loneliness.

They had this melancholy retreat to themselves, and seated on the divan
enclosing the central steam-radiator, they were staring silently at the
glass cabinets mounted in ebonised wood which contained the recovered
fragments of Ilium.

"It's odd," Madame Olenska said, "I never came here before."

"Ah, well--. Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum."

"Yes," she assented absently.