Hollister passed downstairs the next morning at a little after nine o'clock. He had obtained some sleep, of which he stood in sad need. The cheerful elasticity of his temperament would have placed him, by natural rebound, well in the sunlight of awakened hope and invigorated energy, and after hours of miserable disquiet he would now have felt relieved and peaceful, but for one leaden and insuperable fact. This had no relation whatever with financial turmoils and embarrassments; it concerned Claire, and the desolate difference with which her image now rose before his spirit. He had told her that they must henceforth be as strangers, but already the deeps of his unselfish love were stirred by a longing, no less illogical than passionate, to make reality of what had once been illusion, and to verify Claire's indifference through some unknown spell of transformation into that warmth which had thus far proved only lifeless counterfeit. Already Hollister found within him a spacious capacity of pardon toward his wife. Already he had begun to exonerate, to make allowances; and more than all, he had already told himself that to live on without her love would be a hundredfold better than to part with her companionship. Here cropped out the old vein of complaisance and conciliation which had run through his earlier collegiate life, and which later experiences amid all sorts of risk and rivalry had never wholly obscured. It had been his power to concede, his amiable pliancy, wed with a peculiar intellectual shrewdness, that had gone far toward the accomplishment of his phenomenal successes. The man who makes the best of things by instinct is very apt to have the best of things made for him by fortune. His inalienable love for Claire caused him to regard her long hypocrisy with fondly lenient eyes. The wrong done himself rapidly took a secondary place; it was nearly always thus with Hollister, except in those grosser cases of wanton injury from his own sex; and now, when it became a matter between his heart and the woman that heart devotedly loved, he was ready to forego a most liberal share of the usual human egotism. He had a hard day before him. Exertion, diplomacy, astuteness, concentration, all were needed. He was still to fall, but no longer with a headlong plunge. He would now fall on his feet, as it were, but it required a certain agile flexibility to make the descent a graceful one. At any other time he would promptly have left the house after breakfasting. As it was, he waited for Claire. She appeared sooner than he had expected her. She had drank her coffee upstairs. He saw her figure, clad in a morning robe of pale-tinted cachemire, enter the front drawing-room. He had lighted a cigarette, and was standing beside the hearth, where a riotous fire flung merry crimson challenge to the sharp weather outside. He at once threw away his cigarette, and went forward to meet her.