She delayed speaking to Arnaud until, suddenly, breakfast was over. He seldom went to the law office where he had been a partner, but stayed about the lower floor of his house, in the library or directing small outside undertakings. Either that or he left, late, for the Historical Society, with which his connection and interest were uninterrupted. As Linda passed him in the hall he was fumbling in the green bag that accompanied all his journeyings into the city; and she gathered that he intended to make one of his occasional sallies. She proceeded above, to her room, where with steady hands she pinned on her hat. It would be impossible to take any additional clothes, and she'd have to content herself with something ready-made until she could order others in the establishment of her living with Dodge. Her close-fitting jacket, gloves, and a short cape of sables were collected; she gazed finally, thoughtfully, about the room, and then, with a subdued whisper of skirts, descended the stair. Arnaud was in the library, bending over the table that bore his accumulation of papers and serious journals. A lingering impulse to speak was overborne by the memory of what, lately, she had endured--she saw him at the dusty end of that long corridor through which she had monotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph, lost in inconsequential shadows--and she continued firmly to the door which closed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimate silence. XXXVIII The maid who admitted Linda to Pleydon's apartment, first replying, “Yes, Mrs. Hallet. No, Mrs. Hallet,” to her questions, continued in fuller sentences expressing a triumph of sympathy over mere correctness. She lingered at the door of the informal drawing-room, imparting the information that Mr. Pleydon had become very irregular indeed about his meals, and that his return for lunch was uncertain. Something, however, would be prepared for her. Linda acknowledged this briefly. Often, with Mr. Pleydon at home, he wouldn't so much as look at his dinner. Times, too, it seemed as though he had been in the studio all night. He went out but seldom now, and rarely remained away for more than an hour or two. Linda heard this without an indication of responsive interest, and the servant, returning abruptly from the excursion into humanity, disappeared. She was glad to have this opportunity alone to accustom herself to a novel position. But she was once more annoyingly calm. Annoyingly, she reiterated; the fervor of her anger, which at the same time had been bitterly cold, had lessened. She was practically normal. She regarded this, the loss of her unprecedented emotion, in the light of a fraud on her sanguine decision. Linda had counted on its support, its generous irresistible tide, to carry her through the remainder of her life with the exhilaration she had so largely missed.