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 of him, of having studied him while he was unaware of her; and he caught, at once, in that smile, a new expression of friendly criticism, of amused tolerance, that marked some unexpected change in her. She came to him to give him her hand. His voice clung to his throat, in a lump. "Why didn't you come last night?"

"I—I had to work," he said.

She withdrew her hand, still smiling. "Oh, I forgot that you were a working man now!"

Her somewhat formal affectation of parlour gaiety had the effect, on him, of an insincerity; he could not find a reply.

She reached a cushion that stood uncompromisingly in the angle of a sofa arm, shook it and sat down against it, "Won't you take a chair?"

The nearest was a little spindle-shanked pretence of elegance that had been gilded with a brush. "I'm afraid that will break with you," she warned him. He had to cross the room to a bow-legged parlour chair that was all curves and discomfort; and the distance that lay between them, then, was chilling.

"We arrived Wednesday," she said, as if he had asked her for that information. "Mother left at six o'clock last night. So, you see, I didn't waste any time, did I?"

He shook his head, unable to get his eyes past the worn seam of the carpet that divided them. She had changed. She was older, more self-possessed, with an air of having come back from travel to see him from a new point of view. Even her clothes were strange; for, in his expectation, he had thought of her as dressed in