"Frank has done well, too," she had said.

"So I have heard. I am told that he has done very well indeed."

"He has made money, and he is busy and excited over his pursuit of
success--what he calls success. He has given it his life. He thinks of
nothing else--"

She had stopped suddenly, as though her tongue had trapped her into
saying more than she had intended.

"What do you think of my summer home?" she had exclaimed, abruptly.
"Come out and admire the sweet peas," and with a gay little flourish
she had led him into the garden. "They tell me Western flowers have
a brilliance and a fragrance which the East, with all its advantages,
cannot duplicate. Is that true?"

"I believe it is. The East has greater profusion--more varieties--but
the individual qualities do not seem to be so well developed."

"I see you know something of Eastern flowers," she had said, and he
fancied he had caught a note of banter--or was it inquiry?--in her
voice. Then, with another abrupt change of subject, she had made
him describe his house on the hill. But he had said nothing of the
whim-room.

"I must go," he had exclaimed at length. "I left the horses tied in the
field."

"So you must. I shall let Wilson visit you frequently, if he is not a
trouble."

Then she had chosen a couple of blooms and pinned them on his coat,
laughingly overriding his protest that they consorted poorly with his
costume. And she had shaken hands and said good-bye in the manner of
good friends parting.

The more Grant thought of it the more was he convinced that in her case,
as in his own, the years had failed to extinguish the spark kindled in
the foothills that night so long ago. He reminded himself continually
that she was Transley's wife, and even while granting the irrevocability
of that fact he was demanding to know why Fate had created for them both
an atmosphere charged with unspoken possibilities. He had turned her
words over again and again, reflecting upon the abrupt angles her speech
had taken. In their few minutes' conversation three times she had had
to make a sudden tack to safer subjects. What had she meant by that
reference to Eastern and Western flowers? His answer reminded him how
well he knew. And the confession about her husband, the worshipper of
success--"what he calls success"--how much tragedy lay under those light
words?

The valley was filled with shadow, and the level rays of the setting sun
fell on the young man's face and