d at sight of him. All her impulse was to fly to meet
him, but she felt Mrs. Herrick's hand tighten upon her wrist as if it
divined her madness.

His light stick aswing in his hand, his step free and incautious as
ever, gray and slender and seeming to look more at the ground than at
them, the two women watched him drawing near. His was the seeming of a
quiet guest at the quietest of house parties. To meet him Flora saw she
must meet him on the high ground of his reserve. As he came under the
light of the porte-cochere his look, his greeting, his hand, were first
for Mrs. Herrick.

"We were afraid we had missed you altogether," said she.

"It was I who somehow missed your carriage, was hardly expecting to be
expected at such an hour."

Flora watched them meeting each other so gallantly with a trembling
compunction. Mrs. Herrick, who trusted her, was giving her hand in
sublime ignorance. It was vain that Flora told herself she had given
warning. She knew she had thrown the softening veil of her spiritual
crisis over the ugly material fact. Had she said, "I want you to uphold
me while I meet a thief whom I love and wish to protect. He's
magnificent in all other ways except for this one obsession," she knew
Mrs. Herrick simply would have cried, "Impossible, outrageous!" Yet
there they stood together, and as Flora looked at them she could not
have told which was of the finer temper. Kerr's bearing was so unruffled
that it seemed as if he had flown too high to feel the storm Flora was
passing through. But when he turned toward her, in spite of himself,
there was eagerness in his manner. He looked questioningly at her, as if
no time had intervened, as if a moment before he had said to her through
the carriage window, "I will give you twenty-four hours," and now her
time had come to speak.

Only the thought that time was crowding him into a bag's end gave her
courage to vow she would speak that night. Yet not now, while they stood
just met in the deepening dusk, in the sweet breath of the early
flowers; nor later when they passed in friendly fashion, the three of
them, through fairy labyrinths of arch and mirror, into the long, high,
glistening room, whose round table, spread, seemed dwarfed to mushroom
height; nor yet, while this semblance of companionship was between them,
and the great proportions of the place lifting oppression, left them as
unconscious of walls and roof as though they were met in the open. The
clock