about the only comfort she can have
now."

The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord's hand as they drew up before a
showily painted house with many gables and a round tower. "Here we are,"
he said, turning to Everett, "and I guess we understand each other."

They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom Gaylord
introduced as "my sister, Maggie." She asked her brother to show Mr.
Hilgarde into the music room, where Katharine wished to see him alone.

When Everett entered the music room he gave a little start of surprise,
feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some
New York studio that he had always known. He wondered which it was of
those countless studios, high up under the roofs, over banks and
shops and wholesale houses, that this room resembled, and he looked
incredulously out of the window at the gray plain that ended in the
great upheaval of the Rockies.

The haunting air of familiarity about the room perplexed him. Was it
a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it merely the studio
atmosphere that seemed so individual and poignantly reminiscent here
in Wyoming? He sat down in a reading chair and looked keenly about him.
Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother above the
piano. Then it all became clear to him: this was veritably his brother's
room. If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that
Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them
and leaving almost before the renovator's varnish had dried, it was at
least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance's taste was so manifest
that the room seemed to exhale his personality.

Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord,
taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her
eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a
tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree
of embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first
youth, thoroughly sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of
what her brother had called her fight. The camaraderie of her frank,
confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the
curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she had
more good will than confidence toward the world, and the bravado of
her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest that was almost
discontent. The chief charm