the weaving went on, almost completed now. With Wallie Sayre biding
his time, but fairly sure of the result. With Jean Melis happening on
a two-days' old paper, and reading over and over a notice addressed to
him. With Leslie Ward, neither better nor worse than his kind, seeking
adventure in a bypath, which was East 56th Street. And with Dick
wandering the streets of New York after twilight, and standing once with
his coat collar turned up against the rain outside of the Metropolitan
Club, where the great painting of his father hung over a mantelpiece.

Now that he was near Beverly, Dick hesitated to see her. He felt no
resentment at her long silence, nor at his exile which had resulted
from it. He made excuses for her, recognized his own contribution to
the catastrophe, knew, too, that nothing was to be gained by seeing her
again. But he determined finally to see her once more, and then to go
away, leaving her to peace and to success.

She would know now that she had nothing to fear from him. All he wanted
was to satisfy the hunger that was in him by seeing her, and then to go
away.

Curiously, that hunger to see her had been in abeyance while Bassett
was with him. It was only when he was alone again that it came up; and
although he knew that, he was unconscious of another fact, that every
word, every picture of her on the great boardings which walled in every
empty lot, everything, indeed, which brought her into the reality of the
present, loosened by so much her hold on him out of the past.

When he finally went to the 56th Street house it was on impulse. He had
meant to pass it, but he found himself stopping, and half angrily made
his determination. He would follow the cursed thing through now and get
it over. Perhaps he had discounted it too much in advance, waited too
long, hoped too much. Perhaps it was simply that that last phase was
already passing. But he felt no thrill, no expectancy, as he rang the
bell and was admitted to the familiar hall.

It was peopled with ghosts, for him. Upstairs, in the drawing-room
that extended across the front of the house, she had told him of her
engagement to Howard Lucas. Later on, coming back from Europe, he had
gone back there to find Lucas installed in the house, his cigars on
the table, his photographs on the piano, his books scattered about.
And Lucas himself, smiling, handsome and triumphant on the hearth rug,
dressed for dinner except for a brocaded dressing-gown,