ked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softly
withdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined
soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a
trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of
better conduct.

They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of
the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people
passing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talking
across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he
threatened an invasion.

While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have
little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite
meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of
news. How high were Jack's hedges? How were the Doge's date-trees? How
was this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jack
felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of
the swiftly-passing moments. By no reference and by no inference had she
suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing
from her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to be
snapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshine
of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.

"I was to meet father at a bookstore at three," she said, finally,
as she rose.

"Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery," said Jack.

"He has done the galleries. This is the day for buying books--still
more books! I suppose he is spending the orange crop again. If you keep
on spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the maze
of finance?"

"I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, at
least, Peter Mortimer!"

They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now. A word and
she would be going in one direction and he in another. How easily she
might speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will!

"But I must say howdy do to the Doge!" he urged. "I should like to
see him buying books. What a prodigal debauch of learning! I cannot
miss that!"

"It is not far," she said, prolonging Paradise for him.

A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street
which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to
Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windows
spread