e. Make no doubt of that. You may have
ten thousand strange reasons--they count for nothing with me. And I
intend to see you every day. I'll call you up in the morning. Now I
go, and as quickly as I can get out."

XX

He plunged down the steps into a snowstorm. Even during his
precipitate retreat he had realized the advisability of telephoning for
a taxi, but had been incapable of the anti-climax. He pulled his hat
over his eyes, turned up the collar of his coat, and made his way
hastily toward Park Avenue. There was not a cab in sight. Nor was
there a rumble in the tunnel; no doubt the cars were snow-bound. He
hesitated only a moment: it would hardly take him longer to walk to his
hotel than to the Grand Central Station, but he crossed over to Madison
Avenue at once, for it was bitter walking and there was a bare chance
of picking up a cab returning from one of the hotels.

But the narrow street between its high dark walls looked like a
deserted mountain pass rapidly filling with snow. The tall
street-lamps shed a sad and ghostly beam. They might have been the
hooded torches of cave dwellers sheltering from enemies and the storm
in those perpendicular fastnesses. Far down, a red sphere glowed
dimly, exalting the illusion. He almost fancied he could see the
out-posts of primeval forests bending over the canyon and wondered why
the "Poet of Manhattan" had never immortalized a scene at once so
sinister and so lovely.

And no stillness of a high mountain solitude had ever been more
intense. Not even a muffled roar from trains on the distant "L's."
Clavering wondered if he really were in New York. The whole evening
had been unreal enough. Certainly all that was prosaic and ugly and
feverish had been obliterated by what it was no flight of fancy to call
white magic. That seething mass of humanity, that so often looked as
if rushing hither and thither with no definite purpose, driven merely
by the obsession of speed, was as supine in its brief privacy as its
dead. In spite of the fever in him he felt curiously uplifted--and
glad to be alone. There are moods and solitudes when a man wants no
woman, however much he may be wanting one particular woman. . . . But
the mood was ephemeral; he had been too close to her a moment before.
Moreover, she was still unpossessed. . . . She seemed to take shape
slowly in the white whirling snow, as white and imponderable. . . . A
Nordic princess drifting nort