e slushy sidewalk, and into the hired carriage.

When they had gone Adams went into the dining-room and dined alone
without dressing, as he had done almost every evening for the last few
months. The Irish maid waited upon him with a solicitude in which he
read his pose of a deserted husband, and he tried with a forcible,
though silent, bravado to dispel her very evident assumption. Connie had
certainly not deserted him against his will, and when her absence had
begun to show as so incontestable a relief it seemed the basest
ingratitude to force upon her reckless shoulders the odium of an
entirely satisfying arrangement. After a day of mental and physical
exertion the further effort of a conversation with her was something
that he felt to be utterly beyond him, and the distant Colorado days
when she had played the part of a soft, inviting kitten and he had
responded happily to the appeal for constant petting, now lay very far
behind them both--buried somewhere in that cloudless country they had
left. Neither of them wanted the petting back again, and as he rose from
his simple dinner and entered his study at the end of the hall he heaved
a sigh of conscious thankfulness that it was empty.

While he lighted his pipe his eyes turned instinctively to his precious
first editions of which Trent had spoken, and then straight as an arrow
to a photograph of Laura which stood with several others upon his
writing table. The eyes of most men would have lingered, perhaps, on one
of Connie, which was taken, indeed, at her best period and in a
remarkably effective pose, but Adams' glance brushed it with an
indifference only unkind in its mute sincerity, while he sought the
troubled gaze of Laura, who wore in the picture a shy and startled look,
like that of a wild thing suddenly trapped in its reserve. He had never,
even in his own mind, analysed his feeling for the woman whom he was
content to call his friend--he hesitated to condemn himself almost
because he feared to question--but whenever he entered alone his empty
room he knew that he turned instinctively to draw strength and courage
from her pictured face. It was a face that had followed after the ideal
beauty, and in her spiritual isolation, as of one devoted to an inner
vision, he had always found the peculiar pathetic quality of her charm.
Into her verse, chastened and restrained by the sense for perfection
which dwelt in her art, she had put, he knew, this same cloistral vis