beauty? It would be only natural, he thought, if one of those men
should win her heart away, and she, out of pity, should pretend that
nothing had happened.

For that matter, perhaps even now----

At last she understood why, when she entered the room, he sometimes
transfixed her with that poignant, questioning look. Then his
appearance was the same as on the day of their first meeting, as
though, at that dread, he had lost all the ground that she had helped
him to gain.

"Oh, what folly!" she cried, aghast more at the change in him than at
this injustice. "If you knew how seldom I see any one these days,
except you!"

He remained lost in the fatal contemplation of the idea, his body sunk
even deeper in the wheel chair.

"And what's more there never has been anybody else, except one----"

A gleam issued from the eyes of the poor wretch who, while hovering so
nicely between life and death, was still, just because he could see
her, hear her voice, and touch her hand, superior to the dead.

"I am not jealous of him," he affirmed, though not quite convincingly;
since a man may be nearly as jealous of a departed rival as of a
present one. "But every fellow that you know, who walks toward you in
his wholeness and vigor, is my superior. Ah, my music; don't speak of
it! What does all that amount to against those natural qualities,
which I can never regain?"

His frail, handsome, bronzed, young face expressed a puerile
helplessness. And it was with a maternal pity that she reassured him,
using words such as mothers find for children frightened by the dark.

"Forgive me, Lilla. But what do you expect? You are my life."

She reflected that beneath his weakness there was a strength perhaps
greater than the strength of the strong; and now, at last, she thought
of the clutch of the drowning.

Then, instead of meeting her always at Brantome's, he had himself
wheeled to her house. Two or three times a week, as the summer
advanced, he dined there, in the cream-colored room where Balbians and
Dellivers of Andrew Jackson's day--and even a dandy by Benjamin West in
a sky-blue satin coat--looked down from above the mahogany sideboards
that were laden with Colonial glassware and old Lowenstoft. The
windows were open to the mews; the candle flames flickered in a tepid
breeze. They could hear the faint crash of a band that was playing a
Strauss waltz in Washington Square.

She had not opened the Long Island house.