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214 interest in it than that. Harriet Santoine knew enough of the world to know that few men break completely all social connections without some link of either fact or memory still holding them, and that this link most often is a woman. So now, instinctively, she found, she was selecting among the music on the racks arias of lost, disappointed or unhappy love. But she saw that Eaton's interest in these songs appeared no different from his interest in others; it was, so far as she could tell, for their music he cared for them—not because they recalled to him any personal recollection. So far as her music could assure her, then, there was—and had been—no woman in Eaton's life whose memory made poignant his break with his world.

Presently she desisted and turned to other sorts of music. Toward ten o'clock, after she had stopped playing, he excused himself and went to his rooms. She sat for a time, idly talking with Blatchford; then, as a servant passed through the hall and she mistook momentarily his footsteps for those of Avery, she got up suddenly and went upstairs. It was only after reaching her own rooms that she appreciated that the meaning of this action was that she shrank from seeing Avery again that night. But she had been in her rooms only a few minutes when her house telephone buzzed, and answering it, she found that it was Donald speaking to her.

"Will you come down for a few minutes, please, Harry?"

She withheld her answer momentarily. Before Eaton had come into her life, Donald sometimes had called her like this,—especially on those nights when he had worked late with her father,—and she had gone down