"If I like!" he repeated.

But she was on the sidewalk, following the bell boy into the cool,
marble-lined area of the hotel. A smiling clerk handed her a pen, and set
the new universe to rocking.

"Mrs. Leffingwell, I presume? We have your telegram."

Mrs. Leffingwell! Who was that person? For an instant she stood blankly
holding the pen, and then she wrote rapidly, if a trifle unsteadily:
"Mrs. Leffingwell and maid." A pause. Where was her home? Then she added
the words, "St. Louis."

Her rooms were above the narrow canon of the side street, looking over
the roofs of the inevitable brownstone fronts opposite. While Mathilde,
in the adjoining chamber, unpacked her bag, Honora stood gazing out of
the sitting-room windows, trying to collect her thoughts. Her spirits had
unaccountably fallen, the sense of homelessness that had pursued her all
these months overtaken her once more. Never, never, she told herself,
would she enter a hotel again alone; and when at last he came she clung
to him with a passion that thrilled him the more because he could not
understand it.

"Hugh--you will care for me?" she cried.

He kissed away her tears. He could not follow her; he only knew that what
he held to him was a woman such as he had never known before. Tender, and
again strangely and fiercely tender: an instrument of such miraculous
delicacy as to respond, quivering, to the lightest touch; an harmonious
and perfect blending of strength and weakness, of joy and sorrow,--of all
the warring elements in the world. What he felt was the supreme masculine
joy of possession.

At last they sat down on either side of the white cloth the waiter had
laid, for even the gods must eat. Not that our deified mortals ate much
on this occasion. Vesta presided once more, and after the feast was over
gently led them down the slopes until certain practical affairs began to
take shape in the mind of the man. Presently he looked at his watch, and
then at the woman, and made a suggestion.

"Marry you now--this of afternoon!" she cried, aghast. "Hugh, are you in
your right senses?"

"Yes," he said, "I'm reasonable for the first time in my life."

She laughed, and immediately became serious. But when she sought to
marshal her arguments, she found that they had fled.

"Oh, but I couldn't," she answered. "And besides, there are so many
things I ought to do. I--I haven't any clothes."

But this was a plea he could not be expected to recognize. H