What principally swept over Linda was the knowledge that his possession of her must keep them always apart. The reality, all realities, were veils to Pleydon. Her momentary vision of things beyond brick and earth was magnified in him until everything else was obliterated. The fever! Oh, yes, that and his passion for work merged in his passion for her. She could bring him nothing; and she had a curious picture of two Lindas visible to him here--the Linda that was actual and the other, the child. And of them it was the latter he cared most for, recreated out of his desire to defraud his loneliness, to repay the damage to his spirit realized in bronze. She was, suddenly, too weary to stir or lift her hand; a depression as absolute as her flare of rage enveloped her. Now the reason for her coming seemed inexplicable, as if, for the while, her mind had failed. She repressed a shudder at the thought of being, through the long nights of his restlessness and wandering voice, alone with Pleydon. She hadn't, Linda discovered, any of the transmuting feeling for him which alone made surrender possible. She calculated mentally how long it would take her to reach the station, what train would be available. Linda accepted dumbly the fatality to her own hope; for a few hours she had thought it possible to break out of the prison of circumstance, to walk free from all hindrance; but it had been vain. She gazed at Dodge Pleydon intensely--a comprehensive view of the man she had so nearly married, and who, more than any other force, dominated her being. It was already too late for anything but memory; she saw--filled with pity for them both--hardly more than a strange old man with deadened hair and a yellow parchment-like skin. His suit of loose gray flannel gave her a feeling that it had been borrowed from some one she lovingly knew. The gesture of his hand, too, had been copied from a brilliant personage with a consuming impatience at all impotence. “Remember me to Arnaud,” he said, holding her gloves and the short fur cape. “Wait!” he cried sharply, turning to the bookcase against the wall. Pleydon fumbled in a box of lacquered gilt with a silk cord and produced a glove once white but now brown and fragile with age. “You never missed it,” he proceeded in a gleeful triumph; “but then you had so many pairs. Once I sent you nine dozen together from Grenoble. They were nothing, but this you had worn. For a long while it kept the shape of your hand.” “Dodge,” she tried without success to steady her voice, “it stayed with you anyhow, my--my hand.”