Not long afterward Claire found herself alone. Thurston had gone. She felt her cheeks burn as she sat and stared at the floor. His declaration had strangely shocked her, at first, for the entire man, as it were, had undergone a transformation so abrupt and radical as to wear a hue of actual miracle; and it is only across a comfortable lapse of centuries that the human mind can regard such manifestations with anything like complacency. Balaam could not have been more bewildered and disturbed when the Ass spoke. Claire had never thought of Thurston as capable of a live sentiment toward any woman. She had taken it for granted that all this part of his nature was in dignified decay, like his hair and complexion. She had drifted unconsciously, somehow, into the conviction that his passions, if he had ever felt them, were now like the lavendered relics that we shut away in chests. She had warmed to him with a truly filial ardor, and this sudden ruin of their mutual relations now gave her acute stings of regret. But Thurston, who had managed to depart from her with a good deal of nice repose of visage and demeanor, also contrived, with that skill born of wide social experience, to make their next meeting by far less awkward than Claire herself had nervously anticipated. Sophia and Mrs. Bergemann were both present on this occasion. He looked at Claire in so ordinary a way, and spoke with so much apparent ease and serenity, that her self-possession was fed by his, and her dread swiftly became thankful relief. Through the days that followed, Claire and Thurston gradually yet firmly resumed their past agreeable converse. Of course matters could never be the same between them. He stood toward her, inevitably, in a new light; a cloak had fallen from him; she was not quite sure whether she liked him less or more, now that she knew him as the man who had asked her to be his wife; but in reality she did like him much more, and this was because, being a woman, she constantly divined his admiration beneath the intimate yet always guarded courtesy of his manner.