"Mr. Eversley is not in this morning," I was told. They pretended, too, not to know when he would be in. I understood that this meant that he was in, but probably asleep or breakfasting. I found a chair close to one of the elevators and waited. The room was warm and I was faint. I do not know how long I sat there; I must have been almost unconscious. Suddenly I snapped alert. There was Eversley and two or three others stepping into the elevator on the opposite side of the room. I was too late of course to catch them. "Mr. Eversley's apartments," I said to the elevator boy. "First turn to the left," he told me when he had let me out on the fourth floor. I was afraid to ask the number of the room lest he should suspect me of intruding. There were five or six doors down the left corridor. I knocked at one at a hazard, and was rejected by a large woman in deshabille. I was discouraged; somehow the prospect of knocking at every one of those doors and inquiring for Mr. Eversley daunted me. I was dividing between my dread of that and a still greater dread, if I should be found loitering too long in the corridor, of being taken for a suspicious person. In a few moments, however, a woman came out of one of the doors farthest down and moved toward me. I thought it was she I had seen getting into the elevator with Mr. Eversley; she had the gracious air of women who know themselves relied upon. She stopped, hypnotized by my evident wish to speak to her. "Mrs. Eversley?" She acknowledged it. "I am trying to find your husband; I have his permission," I interpolated as I saw her pleasant, open countenance close upon me. I learned afterward how much of her life went to saving him the strain of publicity, and I did not blame her. "My husband never sees visitors in the morning." "If you would show him this card," I begged. "Perhaps he would make an appointment." She recognized the writing on the card, and I saw her relenting. Mr. Eversley, it proved, would see me. He pretended kindly to have recognized me at once, but he didn't ask after the Hardings. He saw that it was the last lap with me. "My dear Miss Lattimore, sit here. Now, tell me." "So," I concluded at the end of half an hour, "I thought you could tell me if it is all gone. If I am never to have it back again, I can go with a musical comedy." I hadn't told him, of course, what the conditions were of my having even that, "but if you think it could be brought back again ..." I could hardly formulate a hope beyond that. "Never in the old way," he answered promptly. "_You_ wouldn't wish that. What you did at twenty you must not wish to do at thirty, for then there is no growth. What do you really feel about it?" "I feel," I said, "as if I could do something--something pressing to be done, but somehow different, so different that I do not know how to describe it to anybody nor to get them to believe in it." "And so you have begun to doubt it yourself?" "I shall believe you," I said.