table carrying a smoky lamp and heaped with tattered
school-books.

In another half hour the bonne, despatched to fetch the children from
their classes, would be back with her flock; and at any moment Geordie's
imperious cries might summon his slave up to the nursery. In the scant
time allotted them, the two sat, and visibly wondered what to say.

Strefford, on entering, had glanced about the dreary room, with its
piano laden with tattered music, the children's toys littering the lame
sofa, the bunches of dyed grass and impaled butterflies flanking the
cast-bronze clock. Then he had turned to Susy and asked simply: "Why on
earth are you here?"

She had not tried to explain; from the first, she had understood the
impossibility of doing so. And she would not betray her secret longing
to return to Nick, now that she knew that Nick had taken definite steps
for his release. In dread lest Strefford should have heard of this, and
should announce it to her, coupling it with the news of Nick's projected
marriage, and lest, hearing her fears thus substantiated, she should
lose her self-control, she had preferred to say, in a voice that she
tried to make indifferent: "The 'proceedings,' or whatever the lawyers
call them, have begun. While they're going on I like to stay quite by
myself.... I don't know why...."

Strefford, at that, had looked at her keenly. "Ah," he murmured; and
his lips were twisted into their old mocking smile. "Speaking of
proceedings," he went on carelessly, "what stage have Ellie's reached,
I wonder? I saw her and Vanderlyn and Bockheimer all lunching cheerfully
together to-day at Larue's."

The blood rushed to Susy's forehead. She remembered her tragic evening
with Nelson Vanderlyn, only two months earlier, and thought to herself.
"In time, then, I suppose, Nick and I...."

Aloud she said: "I can't imagine how Nelson and Ellie can ever want to
see each other again. And in a restaurant, of all places!"

Strefford continued to smile. "My dear, you're incorrigibly
old-fashioned. Why should two people who've done each other the best
turn they could by getting out of each other's way at the right moment
behave like sworn enemies ever afterward? It's too absurd; the humbug's
too flagrant. Whatever our generation has failed to do, it's got rid of
humbug; and that's enough to immortalize it. I daresay Nelson and Ellie
never liked each other better than they do to-day. Twenty years ago,
they'd have been afr