ais_, that had been just like that the last time
she was here. She had stuck a bunch of sweet peas she was wearing into
that goblet. It made an uncannily short bridge to the past, a trivial
reminder like that.

Evidently he felt it, too. Perhaps he had followed her glance toward that
dusty shelf corner. Because, a moment after he had shut the door behind
them, opened a window and taken a look at the fire, he came hesitantly
and a little awkwardly up to her and took her by the shoulders as if to
draw her into an embrace. He was very gentle about it.

Also he was ludicrously tentative. If she'd wanted to let herself go she
could have laughed rather hysterically about that. She disengaged herself
from his hands, decisively, indeed, yet without any air of pique.

"Oh, no, my dear," she said. "Take off your coat and let me get to work.
Where's your sewing kit?"

He produced it instantly (the room was not in real disorder; it only
looked like that to one who did not understand its system), gave her his
coat, wandered restlessly about for a few minutes and presently came to
rest at the deal table where he had spent the greater part of the last
fortnight, turning over, discontentedly, the sheets of score paper he had
left there.

Over her sewing she let her mind run free, forgetting this present Sunday
with its problems, mixing a pleasant amalgam of the past. She wasn't
heartbroken, you know, hardly regretful. She had life about as she wanted
it. She never had been in love with March in the accepted meaning of the
phrase--she had never even thought she was--and it is altogether probable
that if she had found him eager to resume the old relation, she would
have felt a certain reluctance about taking it up again. Life changed
with the years and some of its old urgencies quieted down--for the time
anyhow. Still the night when she had worn those sweet peas remained a
fragrant memory. She was recalled to the present by the violent gesture
he made over the score on his work table.

"This damned thing is rotten," he said with angry conviction. "I knew
it,--I knew it while I wrote it. It may be what they want, but it's
rotten. Straight into the stove is where it ought to go."

"Is that what you're writing for Mrs. Wollaston?" she asked.

He nodded. "I was trying to make up my mind whether to take this with me
to-day or not. If she's the musician I think she is, she'll tell me to
carry it out to the ash can."

"Well, that will