irectly. But before she came a waiter entered with a tea-tray.

"By the lady's direction, sir," he explained as he set the tray on a
table opposite Westerling.

Across a tea-table the prophecy had been made and across a tea-table
they had held most of their talks. Having a picture in memory for
comparison, he was seeing the doorway as the frame for a second picture.
When she appeared the picture seemed the same as of old. There was an
undeniable delight in this first impression of externals. There had been
no promise that she would be beautiful, and she was not. There had been
promise of distinction, and she seemed to have fulfilled it. For a
second she paused on the threshold rather diffidently. Then she smiled
as she had when she greeted him from the veranda as he came up the
terrace steps. She crossed the room with a flowing, spontaneous vitality
that appealed to him as something familiar.

"Ten years, isn't it?" she exclaimed, putting a genuine quality of
personal interest into the words as she gave his hand a quick, firm
shake. Then, with the informality of old acquaintances who had parted
only yesterday, she indicated a place on the sofa for him, while she
seated herself on the other side of the tea-table. "The terrace there in
the foreground," she said with conforming gestures of location, "the
church steeple over the town, the upward sweep of the mountains, and
there the plain melting into the horizon. And, let me see, you took two
lumps, if I remember?"

He would have known the hand that poised over the sugar bowl though he
had not seen the face; a brownish hand, not long-fingered, not narrow
for its length--a compact, deft, firm little hand.

"None now," he said.

"Do you find it fattening?" she asked.

He recognized the mischievous sparkle of the eyes, the quizzical turn of
the lips, which was her asset in keeping any question from being
personal. Nevertheless, he flushed slightly.

"A change of taste," he averred.

"Since you've become such a great man?" she hazarded. "Is that too
strong?" This referred to the tea.

"No, just right!" he nodded.

He was studying her with the polite, veiled scrutiny of a man of the
world. A materialist, he would look a woman over as he would a soldier
when he had been a major-general making an inspection. She was slim,
supple; he liked slim, supple women. Her eyes, though none the less
luminous, and her lips, though none the less flexible, did not seem
quite as o