this, perhaps,
that she had spoken to Arnswald in her dream.

In the morning her faith had been unobscured, confident as a flower at
dawn. Then doubt had come, and now, as the afternoon departed, so did
all belief as well. It was no more hers to recall than the promise of an
earlier day. She had done her best to detain it, she had clutched it;
but she had questioned, and faith is impatient of coercion and restless
if examined. Save its own fair face it brings no letter of introduction;
welcome it for that, and it is at once at home; but look askance, and it
dissolves into a memory and a reproach. Eden had startled it,
unwittingly perhaps; but she had startled it none the less. It had
watched its opportunity as a guest illy treated may watch for his; and
when suspicion, like the lackey that it is, had held the door ajar, it
had eluded her and gone.

Automatically, as though others than herself guided her movement, Eden
touched a bell. "Harris," she said, when the man appeared, "go to Mrs.
Manhattan's and say that Mr. Usselex and myself are unavoidably
prevented from dining with her to-night. That will do." And this order
delivered, she resumed her former seat. Down the street she marked
advancing dusk. The sun had sunk in cataracts of champagne. Westward the
sky was like the apotheosis in Faust, green-barred and crimson, with
background of oscillant yellow. The east was already grey. Overhead was
a shade of salmon which presently disappeared. Then dusk came, and with
it a colorless vapor through which Night, cautious at first as misers
are, displayed one sequin, then another, till taking heart it unbarred
all its treasury to the world.

For some time after the man had gone Eden remained in the drawing-room.
She found her gloves and drew one on again, but the other she tormented
abstractedly in her hand. In her enforced inaction she fell to consoling
herself as children do, arguing with discomfiture as though its shadow
was ineffectual, as though trouble and she were face to face, and yet
too far removed one from another to ever really meet. An hour passed,
and still she sat unassured, restless of thought and conscious only that
an encroaching darkness had obscured a vista on which her eyes had loved
to dwell.

Truly the heart has logic that logic does not know, and as Eden let the
incidents of the afternoon and of the previous evening parade in dumb
show before her, something there was that kept whispering that she