Tuesday night. But the night that followed Wednesday afternoon would
see its overthrow.

This Wednesday it fought gallantly till the very moment of Steven's
arrival. She was still reading Bergson, and her brain struggled to
make out the sense and rhythm of the sentences across the beating of
her heart.

After seven years her heart still beat at Steven's coming.

It remained an excitement and adventure, for she never knew how
he would be. Sometimes he hadn't a word to say to her and left her
miserable. Sometimes, after a hard day's work, he would be tired
and heavy; she saw him middle-aged and her heart would ache for him.
Sometimes he would be young almost as he used to be. She knew that
he was only young for her. He was young because he loved her. She had
never seen him so with Mary. Sometimes he would be formal and frigid.
He talked to her as a man talks to a woman he is determined to keep
at a distance. She hated Steven then, as passion hates. He had come
before now in a downright bad temper and was the old, irritable Steven
who found fault with everything she said and did. And she had loved
him for it as she had loved the old Steven. It was his queer way of
showing that he loved her.

But he had not been like that for a very long time. He had grown
gentler as he had grown older.

To-day he showed her more than one of his familiar moods. She took
them gladly as so many signs of his unchanging nature.

He still kept up his way of coming in, the careful closing of the
door, the slight pause there by the threshold, the look that sought
her and that held her for an instant before their hands met.

She saw it still as the look that pleaded with her while it caressed
her, that said, "I know we oughtn't to be so pleased to see each
other, but we can't help it, can we?"

It was the look of his romantic youth.

As long as she saw it there it was nothing to her that Rowcliffe had
changed physically, that he moved more heavily, that his keenness and
his slenderness were going, that she saw also a slight thickening of
his fine nose, a perceptible slackening of the taut muscles of his
mouth, and a decided fulness about his jaw and chin. She saw all these
things; but she did not see that his romantic youth lay dying in the
pathos of his eyes and that if it pleaded still it pleaded forgiveness
for the sin of dying.

His hand fell slackly from hers as she took it.

It was as if they were still on their guard, still a