of
the Professor of palaeontology, who had come to talk over with her the
next winter's programme for the Higher Thought Club. They debated the
question for an hour, and when Mrs. Sperry departed Margaret had a
confused impression that the course was to deal with the influence of
the First Crusade on the development of European architecture--but the
sentient part of her knew only that Dawnish had not come.

He "bobbed in," as he would have put it, after dinner--having, it
appeared, run across Ransom early in the day, and learned that the
latter would be absent till evening. Margaret was in the study with her
husband when the door opened and Dawnish stood there. Ransom--who had
not had time to dress--was seated at his desk, a pile of shabby law
books at his elbow, the light from a hanging lamp falling on his
grayish stubble of hair, his sallow forehead and spectacled eyes.
Dawnish, towering higher than usual against the shadows of the room,
and refined by his unusual pallor, hung a moment on the threshold, then
came in, explaining himself profusely--laughing, accepting a cigar,
letting Ransom push an arm-chair forward--a Dawnish she had never seen,
ill at ease, ejaculatory, yet somehow more mature, more obscurely in
command of himself.

Margaret drew back, seating herself in the shade, in such a way that
she saw her husband's head first, and beyond it their visitor's,
relieved against the dusk of the book shelves. Her heart was still--she
felt no throbbing in her throat or temples: all her life seemed
concentrated in the hand that lay on her knee, the hand he would touch
when they said good-by.

Afterward her heart rang all the changes, and there was a mood in which
she reproached herself for cowardice--for having deliberately missed
her one moment with him, the moment in which she might have sounded the
depths of life, for joy or anguish. But that mood was fleeting and
infrequent. In quieter hours she blushed for it--she even trembled to
think that he might have guessed such a regret in her. It seemed to
convict her of a lack of fineness that he should have had, in his youth
and his power, a tenderer, surer sense of the peril of a rash
touch--should have handled the case so much more delicately.

At first her days were fire and the nights long solemn vigils. Her
thoughts were no longer vulgarized and defaced by any notion of
"guilt," of mental disloyalty. She was ashamed now of her shame. What
had happened was as m