re child's play to him. He
took them apart and put them together again with a careless, confident,
infallible perspicacity that amazed his colleagues and his opponents.
And, as Frank Crawford had pointed out, he took a savagely contemptuous
pleasure in making those clients pay through the nose.

But he could look neither back at Rose, nor forward to her. He could
not, by any stretch of resolution, have nerved himself to the point of
giving up that house that had nearly all his memories of her associated
with it. There hadn't been a change of a single piece of furniture in it
since she went away. Her bedroom and her dressing-room were just as she
had left them. Her clothes were just as they had been left after the
packing of that small trunk. She might have been off spending a week-end
somewhere.

The attitude couldn't be kept up forever, he knew. Some time or other
he'd have to cross the next bridge; come to some more definite
understanding with Rose than that inconclusive ridiculous scene there in
Dubuque had left him with. (_What_ a fool he had been that day!) There
were the twins coming along. For the present, their nurse (It wasn't
Mrs. Ruston. He'd taken the first reasonable excuse for supplanting
her.) and the pretty little snub-nosed nurse-maid Rose had liked, could
supply their wants well enough. But the time wasn't so far ahead when
they'd need a mother. What would he do then; let Rose have them half the
time and keep them half the time himself? He'd read a perfectly beastly
book once,--he couldn't remember the title of it--about a child who had
been brought up that way. But, at all events, he needn't do anything
yet.

Meanwhile, it healed his lacerated pride to march along and keep the
routine going. It was with a perfectly immense relief that he snatched
at the chance to buy the McCrea house, and by so doing make the
permanency of his way of life a little more secure. He could keep what
he had, anyway. And he could show the world, and Rose, that he wasn't
the broken frantic creature he knew she'd seen, and suspected it had
glimpsed. John Williamson's explanation wasn't altogether wrong.

Perhaps, had it been possible for Jimmy Wallace to tell him, just as he
told Violet and John Williamson, how Rose's voice "richened up as if
the words tasted good to her," when she mentioned the fact that she
heard from her husband "regularly but not much," he might have drawn the
same favorable augury from it that Violet