He watched her while she glided across the room; but it was only when
her door had closed and he had dropped into his seat that he was able to
state to himself the fact that the mere sight of her again had
demolished all the barricades he had been building in his heart against
her for the last six months. They had fallen more easily than the walls
of Jericho at the blast of the sacred horn. The inflection of her voice,
the look from her eyes, the gestures of her hands, had dispelled them
into nothingness, like ramparts of mist. But it was not that alone! He
was too much a man of affairs not to give credit to the practical
abilities she had shown that night. No graces of person or charms of
mind or resources of courage could have called forth his admiration more
effectively than this display of prosaic executive capacity. What had to
be done she had done more promptly, wisely, and easily than any man
could have accomplished it. She had foreseen possibilities and
forestalled accident with a thoroughness which he himself could not have
equalled.

"My God!" he groaned, inwardly, "what a wife she would have made for any
man! How I could have loved her, if it hadn't been for--"

He stopped abruptly and leaped to his feet, looking around dazed on the
great empty hail, at the end of which a porter slept in his chair, while
the clerk blinked drowsily behind his desk.

"I do love her," he declared to himself. "All summer long I have uttered
blasphemies. I do love her. Whatever she may have been, she shall be my
wife."

Out on the terrace the cold wind was grateful, and he stood for a minute
bareheaded, letting it blow over his fevered face and through his hair.
It had risen during the last hour, making the pines rock slowly in the
starlight and swelling their moan into deep sobs.

As Derek Pruyn paced the terrace in strained expectation he was deceived
again and again into the thought that something was approaching. Now it
was the champing and stamping of horses toiling up the ascent; now it
was the bray and throb of the automobile; now it was the voices of men,
conversing or calling or breaking into laughter. Twenty times he
hastened to the steps at the end of the terrace, sure he could not have
been mistaken, only to hear the earth-forces sob and sough and shout
again, as if in derision of this puny, presumptuous mortal, with his
evanescent joy and pain.

So another hour passed. His mind was not of the imaginative order