And now, Judge Trent had told her that she would be free to leave in a fortnight. She had walked the three miles from Broad Street with a buoyant step, and she had vowed that never, not for any consideration whatever, would she set foot in America again. Vienna was the city of her heart as well as of her future exploits. She would buy the old Zattiany palace from her widowed niece-in-law and make it the most famous rendezvous in Europe. But of all this nothing to Clavering until they were in the Dolomites. She rang for her maid and exchanged her tweed walking suit for a tea gown of violet velvet and snow white chiffon, with stockings and slippers to match. She expected no one but it was always a delight to her to be exquisitely and becomingly dressed. Even in the seclusion of her Hungarian estate she had arrayed herself as appropriately for outdoors, and as fastidiously for the house, as if she had been under the critical eye of her world, for daintiness and luxury were as ingrained as ordinary cleanliness and refinement. During the war she had not rebelled at her hard and unremitting labors, but she had often indulged in a fleeting regret for the frequent luxury of the bath, the soft caress of delicate underwear, for charming toilettes; and she had sometimes scowled at her white cotton stockings with a feeling of positive hatred. Judge Trent, while she was still in Austria, had sent her a cheque for forty thousand dollars. She had given half of it to relief organizations in Vienna, and then gone to Paris and indulged in an orgy of clothes. She looked back upon that wholly feminine reversion, when she had avoided every one she had ever known, as one of the completely satisfactory episodes of her life. Even with unrestored youth and beauty, and a soberer choice of costumes, she would still have experienced a certain degree of excited pleasure in adorning herself. She had always liked the light freshness of chintz in her bedroom, leaving luxury to her boudoir; but here she had furnished no boudoir; her stay was to be short, and her bedroom was as large as two ordinary rooms. She spent many hours in it, when its violet and white simplicities appealed to her mood. Today it was redolent of the lilacs Clavering had sent her, and through the open windows came the singing of birds in the few trees still left in the old street. She loved comfort as much as she loved exercise, and after her careful toilette was finished and her maid had gone, she settled herself luxuriously in a deep chair before her desk and opened one of the drawers. The European mail had arrived yesterday and she had only glanced through half of it. But she must read all of those letters today and answer some of them before the sailings on Saturday.