tness, "do you know
I've always had a fancy that he is meant for Laura in another life."

"In another life?" he questioned merrily.

"Oh, things went crosswise here, you see," she answered, "but somewhere
else, who knows? They may all be straightened out."

The question of Laura's possible fate in "another life" failed somehow
to disturb him seriously; but as he drove presently down the darkening
street, under the high electric lights, he found himself wondering
vaguely why Gerty had so persistently associated her friend with Roger
Adams.

CHAPTER X

IN WHICH ADAMS COMES INTO HIS INHERITANCE

Five minutes had hardly passed after Laura was alone before the servant
brought up the name of Roger Adams, and an instant later he was holding
her hand in his cordial grasp. At his appearance she had for a moment a
sense of the returning reality of things--the vigour of his hand clasp,
the strong, kindly look of his face, the winning, protective tenderness
of his smile, these gave her an impression of belonging to the permanent
instead of to the merely evanescent part of life. When he sat down in
the big leather chair from which Kemper had risen, and removing his
glasses, fixed upon her the attentive gaze of his narrow, short-sighted
eyes, she felt immediately the first sensation of peace that she had
known for many weeks. His hand, long, heavily veined, muscular, and yet
finely sensitive, lay outstretched upon the mahogany lid of her desk,
and she found herself presently contrasting it with the square, brown,
roughly shaped hand of Kemper. Her senses, her brain, her heart were
still full of her lover, yet she was able to feel through some strange
enfranchisement of her dual nature, that there was a mental directness,
an impassioned morality about the man she did not love in which the man
she loved was entirely lacking. But the knowledge of this curiously
enough, served to increase rather than to diminish the persistent
quantity of her emotion, and the few minutes during which Kemper had
been absent from her had sufficed to exaggerate his image to a statue
that was heroic in its proportions. It was as if her heart--she was
still lucid enough to think in a figure of speech--were an altar
dedicated to the perpetual flame before a deity who had already showed
himself to be both terrible and obscure.

Now as she sat looking, with her rapt gaze, at the man before her, she
was thinking how absolutely and without reservat