ch seemed less a fortunate grace of aspect than the result of a
peculiar quality of vision. Was it his own life that had opened his eyes
until he could look into the secret chambers in the lives of others?

In Gramercy Park she found Mrs. Payne waiting for her with the carriage,
and she accepted almost eagerly the old lady's invitation to spend the
morning in a search for hats. At the moment it seemed to her that hats
offered as promising an aid to forgetfulness as any other, and she threw
herself immediately into the pursuit of them with an excitement which
enabled her, for the time, at least, to extinguish the fierce hunger of
her soul in supplying the more visible exactions of her body.

At luncheon Gerty appeared, wearing a startling French gown, which, she
said, had just arrived that morning. After the first casual greeting
they fell into an animated discussion of the choice of veils, during
which Gerty declared that Laura had never selected the particular spots
which would be most becoming to her features. "You get them too large
and too far apart," she insisted, picking up a black net veil from a
pile on Laura's table, "even I with my silly nose can't stand this
kind."

Laura's eyes were fixed upon her with their singular intensity of look,
but in spite of the absorption of her gaze, she had not heard a single
word that Gerty uttered.

"Yes, yes, you're right," she said; but instead of thinking of the
veils, she was wondering all the time if Gerty had really forgotten her
jealousy of Madame Alta and the letter she had burned.

"I shall tell him this afternoon and that will make everything easy,"
she thought; and when, after a little frivolous conversation Gerty had
remembered an engagement and driven hurriedly away, the situation
appeared to Laura to have become perfectly smooth again. At the
announcement of Kemper's name, she crossed the room to meet him with
this impulse still struggling for expression. "I shall tell him now, and
then everything will be made easy," she repeated.

But when she opened her lips to speak, she found that the confession
would not come into words, and what she really said was:

"It has been a century since yesterday, for I've done nothing but shop."

Laughing he caught her hands, and she saw with her first glance, that he
was in one of his ironic moods.

"I thought I'd netted a wren," he answered, "but it seems I've caught a
bird of Paradise."

"Then it was your ignorance o