he past few months--wouldn't."

The fact that he did not go back to University Place, either on this or
any subsequent occasion when she thought it well to withdraw there,
emphasized his helplessness to aid her. By the time autumn returned, and
the household was once more settled in town, he had grown aware that
between Diane and himself there was an impalpable wall of separation,
which he could no more pass than he could transcend the veil between
material existence and the Unseen World. He began to perceive that what
he had called detachment of manner, more or less purposely maintained,
was in reality an element in the situation which from the beginning had
precluded friendship. Diane and he could not be friends in any of the
ordinary senses of the word. As employer and employed their necessary
dealings might be friendly; but to anything more personal, under the
present arrangement, there was attached the impossible condition of
stepping off from terra firma into space.

The obvious method of putting their mutual relationship on a basis
richer in future potentialities Derek still felt himself unable to adopt
of his own initiative act. The vow which bound him to his dead wife was
one from which circumstances--and not merely his own fiat--must absolve
him; but as winter advanced it seemed to him that life had begun to
speak on the subject with a voice of imperative command.

It was the middle of January, when a small, accidental happening drew
all his growing but still debatable intentions into one sharp point of
resolution. It was such an afternoon as comes rarely, even in the
exhilarating winter of New York--an afternoon when the unfathomable blue
of the sky overhead runs through all the gamut of tones from lavender to
indigo; when the air has the living keenness of that which the Spirit
first breathed into the nostrils of man; when the rapture of the heart
is that of neither passion, wine, nor nervous excitement, but comes
nearer the exaltation of deathless youth in a deathless world than
anything else in a temporary earth. It was a day on which even the jaded
heart is in the mood to begin all over again, in renewed pursuit of the
happiness which up to now has been elusive. To Derek, whose heart was by
no means jaded, it was a day on which the instinctive hope of youth,
which he supposed he had outlived, proved itself of one essence with the
conscious passion of maturity.

When, as he walked homeward along Fifth A