The pause which followed this at the other end of the wire protracted itself. Then in a lowered voice, as though not wanting any one at her end of the wire to hear, Joan replied, “Of course we had made plans. But I’d rather be with you, Hugh. I’ll have to think of a way out.... Ah! Well, come for me here then, but not before one o’clock. I know a cool place, small,—a garden in 33rd Street. We won’t be bothered by any of our own crowd there.” This sounded like Hugh’s good fortune. It sounded like that to him, to his ears, to his brain. But deeper than that—? There were no answering vibrations deeper. Yet his reply went over the wire in as resonant a voice as though all his heart were behind it, so strong is habit, “Bless you. You’re an angel.” Hugh, Ariel, Glenn and Anne swung up the Avenue through May sunshine, headed for the New Texas Galleries. As they neared Fifty-ninth Street, Glenn strode ahead, and by the time the others had come up had bought a bunch of arbutus from a vender on the corner there. He handed them to Ariel. She was enchanted. “But what are you going to do with them?” Hugh asked. To carry them in her hand for the next few hours would be wasted effort, for they would be very dead, indeed, by the time the afternoon was over. “Why, cherish them, of course. I love them,” Ariel responded. “But they’ll die.” “No. I don’t think so.” She held them to her nose again, and her expression seemed one of assurance that anything that thrilled and delighted her as these pink-and-white-tight Heaven-smelling flowers did would live forever. Looking down at her, Hugh believed it. They made rather an arresting group even in the stream of arresting people which throngs the Avenue on spring afternoons: Hugh, with his high-held, hawklike, dark head, clean-cut shoulders and long stride; Anne, buoyantly collegiate; Glenn, hatless, and with hair somewhat long and unbrushed, free in manner and gesture as if he were walking and talking in a wilderness instead of in the heart of a great city. Ariel alone would have passed without comment. She was wearing a heliotrope felt hat—a present from Mrs. Weyman—which shaded the upper part of her face, an English tweed suit well enough cut to pass muster even on the Avenue, and one of her ivory-colored silk blouses, open at the throat. The only thing to attract attention to her was the fact that she was being swept along by her three rather striking companions, the obvious center of their exuberance.