ve her and she loves you or I
miss my guess, an' there ain't no beatin' that combination. If I was
fakin' with you I wouldn't need no more than that to make me see your
two names in a ring. And remember this, too, boy! There never was
anything that turned out just the way you expected. You figure on it
twenty ways. It always beats you; and yet when you look back, you say,
'Of course; what a fool I was.' Good-by, boy--here next Tuesday at
three unless I tell you different by letter." Rosalie was gone.

Dr. Blake walked in the park that night until dawn broke over the city
roofs. And he drew out a dull and anxious existence,--shot and broken
with whims, fancies, all the irregularities of a lover,--during the
week in which he awaited Rosalie's next report.

VIII

THE FISH NIBBLES

Quietly, naturally, giving a preliminary word of direction to the maid
as she lifted the portieres, Mrs. Markham entered the drawing room.
Pricking with a sense of impatience, tinctured by nervousness over his
own folly, Robert H. Norcross awaited her there. She stood a moment
regarding him; in that moment, the quick perception, veiled away by an
expression of thought, to which the railroad baron owed so much, took
her all in. Superficially, he saw a tall woman, approaching fifty, but
still vigorous and free from over-burdening flesh.

"Good evening; I am glad to see you," she said quietly. She had a low
voice and pleasing. He remembered then that he had failed to rise, so
intent had he been on her face; and he got to his feet in some
embarrassment. As she approached him, his mind, going from detail to
detail, noticed her powerful head, her Grecian nose, rising without
indentation from a straight forehead, her firm but pleasant mouth, her
large, light gray eyes which looked a little past him. Here was a
person on his own level of daring mental flight. He remembered only one
other woman who had struck him with the force of this one. That other
was an actress, supreme in her generation not so much for temperament
as for mind. As he looked over a reception crowd at her, intellect had
spoken to intellect; they had known each other. So Paula Markham struck
him on first sight.

He was about to speak, but she put in her word first.

"Do you come personally or professionally? I had an engagement for an
unknown visitor on professional business. Are you he? For if you are,
it would be better for you not to tell me your name--I am Mrs.
Mark