above all (and this gave her art
the grace of a natural quality) there were none of those damnable
implications whereby a woman, in welcoming her friend's betrothed, may
keep him on pins and needles while she laps the lady in complacency. So
masterly a performance, indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss
Gaynor's door-step words--"To be so kind to me, how she must have liked
you!"--though he caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of
fitness to transmit them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew
who was unfailingly certain to enjoy a good thing. It was perhaps the
one drawback to his new situation that it might develop good things
which it would be impossible to hand on to Margaret Vervain.

The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friend's
powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his
distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning down her
street instead of going on to the club. He would show her that he knew
how to value her; he would ask her to achieve with him a feat
infinitely rarer and more delicate than the one he had appeared to
avoid. Incidentally, he would also dispose of the interval of time
before dinner: ever since he had seen Miss Gaynor off, an hour earlier,
on her return journey to Buffalo, he had been wondering how he should
put in the rest of the afternoon. It was absurd, how he missed the
girl....Yes, that was it; the desire to talk about her was, after all,
at the bottom of his impulse to call on Mrs. Vervain! It was absurd, if
you like--but it was delightfully rejuvenating. He could recall the
time when he had been afraid of being obvious: now he felt that this
return to the primitive emotions might be as restorative as a holiday
in the Canadian woods. And it was precisely by the girl's candor, her
directness, her lack of complications, that he was taken. The sense
that she might say something rash at any moment was positively
exhilarating: if she had thrown her arms about him at the station he
would not have given a thought to his crumpled dignity. It surprised
Thursdale to find what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure;
and though his sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to
any conscious purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that his
sentimental economies had left him such a large surplus to draw upon.

Mrs. Vervain was at home--as usual. When one visits the cemetery one
expects to find the angel o