iliatingly calm and comforted. It
was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others
and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet
tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and
her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed
sincerity. It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over,
and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of
playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt
her. Even after they had clasped hands for good-bye at the Fall River
station, and he had turned away alone, the conviction remained with him
of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed.

He wandered back to the club, and went and sat alone in the deserted
library, turning and turning over in his thoughts every separate second
of their hours together. It was clear to him, and it grew more clear
under closer scrutiny, that if she should finally decide on returning
to Europe--returning to her husband--it would not be because her old
life tempted her, even on the new terms offered. No: she would go only
if she felt herself becoming a temptation to Archer, a temptation to
fall away from the standard they had both set up. Her choice would be
to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it
depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.

In the train these thoughts were still with him. They enclosed him in
a kind of golden haze, through which the faces about him looked remote
and indistinct: he had a feeling that if he spoke to his
fellow-travellers they would not understand what he was saying. In
this state of abstraction he found himself, the following morning,
waking to the reality of a stifling September day in New York. The
heat-withered faces in the long train streamed past him, and he
continued to stare at them through the same golden blur; but suddenly,
as he left the station, one of the faces detached itself, came closer
and forced itself upon his consciousness. It was, as he instantly
recalled, the face of the young man he had seen, the day before,
passing out of the Parker House, and had noted as not conforming to
type, as not having an American hotel face.

The same thing struck him now; and again he became aware of a dim stir
of former associations. The young man stood looking about him with the
dazed air of the foreigner flung upon the hars