head very erect, she
replied:

"I am a friend of Mr. Rokeby's. Will you kindly say that Mrs. Osborn
Kerr has called?" Second thoughts sent her fumbling in her bag and
producing a card.

"You had better send in my card," she said.

Desmond was busy with a client when the card was laid before him, but
when he had glanced at it, he took it up and looked again, as if not
believing his eyes. "In five minutes," he told the clerk; and, turning
to the client, he clinched in that remarkably short while an
arrangement which they had been discussing and quarrelling over for
half an hour.

He stood up, waiting for Marie to enter. When she came, he was struck,
not having seen her since the birth of the third baby, by the further
alteration in her. How thin she was! And quiet! With that dullness
which, in his judgment, too much domesticity always brought to women.
Like most ultra-modern men, while secretly making a fetish of the
softer virtues in woman, he wanted them expressed somehow in an
up-to-the-minute setting. Yet he understood dimly the struggle of
twentieth-century woman in trying to make herself at once as new as
to-day and as old as creation.

"Well, this is nice," he said very kindly, taking her hand with
deference. "I've a free hour, and lo! you come to fill it. Let me pull
the visitor's chair right up to this fire, and give you a cup of tea."

His kindness and attention were all about Marie with the benevolence
of a new warm garment on a cold day. She sat down in the great soft
chair which he wheeled forwards for her, loosened her out-of-date fur
neckwear, and looked around her with feminine interest.

"What a pretty office!" she said. "And you have flowers."

"Ladies sometimes come to tea," he replied smilingly, pressing a bell.

To the clerk he said: "Get tea from Fuller's, right away."

"I ought not to hinder you," said Marie; and, as she said it, there
came to her the fragrance of the memory how in her girl days she had,
in the course of her business and pleasure, hindered many men like
this, and how pleased and flattered they were to be thus hindered. She
wished she could feel as sure of herself and her power to charm
without the least exertion as she was then. She went on: "I really
hardly know why I came, but I was in town; and I thought you'd like to
hear the news about Osborn. He's gone, you know; gone."

Rokeby wheeled right round to face her, in his swing chair: "I know,"
he nodded, "at least I