eems
to me to be looking very well, and yet she's altered, somehow--I can't
say exactly how or where."

"Then you've noticed it," returned Mr. Wilberforce, with a sigh, and he
asked almost immediately: "Does she appear to you to be happier than she
was?"

"Happier? Well, perhaps, but I hardly analysed the impression she
produced. There was a change in her, that was all I saw."

"Did she speak to you, I wonder, of her book?"

Adams laughed softly. "She spoke of it to say that she was tired of it,"
he answered, "but that is only the inevitable reaction of youth--it's a
part of the universal rhythm of thought, nothing more."

Mr. Wilberforce shook his head a little doubtfully. "I wish I could feel
so confident," he returned, while a quick impatience--almost a contempt
awoke in Adams' mind. Was it possible that this man beside him, with his
white hairs, his blanched skin, his benign old-world sentiments, was,
like Trent, a mere worshipper of the literary impulse in its outward
accomplishment? Did he love the poet in the woman rather than the woman
in the poet? As Adams turned to look at him, he thought, not without a
certain grim humour, that he beheld another victim to the vice of
sentimentality; and in his mental grouping he placed his companion among
those who, like Connie, were in bondage to the images of their
imaginations.

"And yet even if she should cease to write poems she will always live
one," he added lightly.

"Yes, she will still be herself," agreed Mr. Wilberforce, but his words
carried no conviction of comfort; and when he turned at the corner to
take his car, it was with the air of a man oppressed by the weight of
years.

When Adams reached home he found Connie, dressed in her blue velvet with
the little twinkling aigrette, on the point of starting for an afternoon
drive with her nurse in the Park. The events of the night had been
entirely effaced from her mind by the newer interests of the day; and as
he looked at her in amazement, it seemed to him that she bore a greater
resemblance to the rosy girl he had first loved than she had done for
many weary and heart-sick months. When he left her, presently, to go
back to his office, it was with a feeling of hopefulness which entered
like an infusion of new blood into his veins. The relapse might have
been, after all, less serious than he had at first believed, and
Connie's cure might become soon not only a beautiful dream, but an
accomplished good. H