, came over her. At the end of a few minutes she rose to leave,
and a little later as he walked with her along Sixty-ninth Street in the
direction of the Park, she had, for the first time in her life, a vague
intuition that the secret of happiness, after all, might lie for her,
not in the gratification but in the relinquishment of desire.

"I saw Kemper a while ago," he remarked, as they crossed Fifth Avenue to
the opposite sidewalk which ran along the wall under the bared November
trees. "He seemed very much interested in some mining scheme which
Barclay has gone in for. I never saw him more enthusiastic."

"Was he?" she asked indifferently; and she felt almost a resentment
against Kemper because he could pass so easily from the reconciliation
with her to the subject of mining. Since the evening before, when she
had received the news of his absence with Madame Alta, her attitude to
her lover had, unconsciously to herself, undergone a change; and her
critical faculty, so long dominated by her feeling, appeared now to have
usurped the place which was formerly held by her ideal image of him. But
this awakening of her intellect had no power whatever over her love,
which remained unaltered, and the one result of her clearer mental
vision was to destroy her happiness, while it did not lessen the
strength of her emotion.

She glanced up at Adams as he walked beside her in the pale sunshine,
and the smile with which he responded to her look, awoke in her the
impulse to confess to him the burden which oppressed her thoughts.
Realising that it would be impossible to confide these things to any
human being, she changed the subject by asking him a trivial question
about Trent's play.

"There's no doubt of his success, I think," he answered, "but just now
his mind is absorbed with other things. He's as deep in his love as he
ever was in his ambition."

"So he has found her?" enquired Laura, with but little animation. She
was glad that Trent was happy at last, but she could not force herself
to feel an interest in this love affair which was so unlike her own.

"Well, he didn't have to look far," rejoined Adams, laughing, "he
discovered her, I believe, in the same apartment house. Some of us," he
concluded a little sadly, "go a good deal farther with considerably less
success."

"It does puzzle one," said Laura, thinking of Kemper, "that some people
should find what they want lying on their very doorstep, while others
must go