wonderful, Mr. Farron," she answered a little huskily.

"Better and better," answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a
letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray.

"What's that?" asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed
on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she
always asked Farron about his.

He seemed to be thinking and didn't answer her.

Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked:

"And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?"

He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain
absence of tone:

"I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph."

Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a
printed address in the corner, lost interest.

"You may shut the house, Pringle," she said.

CHAPTER VII

Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and
turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without
even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was
aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her
awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was
piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet
covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent
to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present,
the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her
dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this,
the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close
to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed
that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She
stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays
through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look
down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced
by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost
intolerably beautiful. "Oh, I love him so much!" she said to herself, and
her lips actually whispered the words, "so much! so much!"

She threw the window high as a reproof of those shivers across the way,
and, jumping into bed, hastily sandwiched her small body between the warm
bedclothes. She was almost instantly asleep.

Overhead the faint, but heavy, footfall of Pringle ceased. The house was
silent; the city had