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 the train with a feeling compounded of sadness and relief.

Walking rapidly toward a telephone booth, he called Hellgren's number, but there was no reply.

As the days went by his mind began conjuring up other aphorisms. If their No was never final, what about their Yes? When Olga had, on her own initiative, told him she loved him, it had never occurred to him that there could be the slightest ambiguity in the admission. Even now, after eight days of silence, he was prepared to swear by all that was sacred that she had meant it. It was the transparent sincerity of her tone rather than the words themselves that had sent him away in such elation and borne him up during this maddening interval. He was also prepared to swear that Olga had good reasons for not making a sign,—reasons that would prove simple once there was an opportunity for her to explain them. That Olga, after her last admission to him, should feel ill at ease in Oscar's house was what he could best understand in all the world, yet surely she must realize what a gone feeling it gave him to be left without news, without the reassurances that a newly born love must have to thrive upon.

He had revolved the wisdom of going out to Enghien, but apart from the fact that Rhoda's presence in Paris had made that plan difficult of execution, he