pacing the floor at night. She thought that he seldom or never
went to the Wheelers'.

And so passed the tenth day of David's illness, with the smile on
Elizabeth's face growing a trifle fixed as three days went by without
the shabby car rattling to the door; with "The Valley" playing its
second and final week before going into New York; and with Leslie Ward
unconsciously taking up the shuttle Clare had dropped, and carrying the
pattern one degree further toward completion.

XIV

JUST how Leslie Ward had drifted into his innocuous affair with the star
of "The Valley" he was not certain himself. Innocuous it certainly was.
Afterwards, looking back, he was to wonder sometimes if it had not been
precisely for the purpose it served. But that was long months after.
Not until the pattern was completed and he was able to recognize his own
work in it.

The truth was that he was not too happy at home. Nina's smart little
house on the Ridgely Road had at first kept her busy. She had spent
unlimited time with decorators, had studied and rejected innumerable
water-color sketches of interiors, had haunted auction rooms and bid
recklessly on things she felt at the moment she could not do without,
later on to have to wheedle Leslie into straightening her bank balance.
Thought, too, and considerable energy had gone into training and
outfitting her servants, and still more into inducing them to wear the
expensive uniforms and livery she provided.

But what she made, so successfully, was a house rather than a home.
There were times, indeed, when Leslie began to feel that it was not even
a house, but a small hotel. They almost never dined alone, and when they
did Nina would explain that everybody was tied up. Then, after dinner,
restlessness would seize her, and she would want to run in to the
theater, or to make a call. If he refused, she nursed a grievance all
evening.

And he did not like her friends. Things came to a point where, when
he knew one of the gay evenings was on, he would stay in town, playing
billiards at his club, or occasionally wandering into a theater, where
he stood or sat at the back of the house and watched the play with
cynical, discontented eyes.

The casual meeting with Gregory and the introduction to his sister
brought a new interest. Perhaps the very novelty was what first
attracted him, the oddity of feeling that he was on terms of friendship,
for it amounted to that with surprising quickness,