He gave her back a straight look and spoke deliberately. “I have tried for a long time to do with you what I saw as best--to pull the strings--and I have failed, over and over. When you declared a little while ago that I or nothing else could change your purpose, I suddenly had a new vision. I realized that if you were poor material I could not save you, and that you would not be worth saving. And I realized that if you were good material, only some way that I had not tried could affect you; and it came to me,” he went on grimly, “that bitter experience might do for you what I had not done. And it also came to me that if anything could arouse you to the human realities, no experiences might be so effective as what might lie before you in this very marriage you had planned.” “And that is why you said nothing?” she breathed. He nodded. “I have taken my hands off, to give life its chance to pull the strings.” She gazed at him a moment longer. Then she returned to the car. But as she stepped in, she paused and glanced back once more. Her face was very pale and dazed--it held the look of one who wondered, but could not understand. * * * * * Restlessly, but with a heavy heart within him, Clifford wandered about the great lobby of the Grantham. A slow hour passed--then another. Then he saw Peter Loveman, on his plump face an expression which for Loveman was very serious, come up the broad stairway and go straight for the desk at which visitors sent up their names to guests of the house. Loveman spoke to the blonde within the grilled enclosure--waited--then walked away with a sober, puzzled look. He sighted Clifford in a deep lounging-chair, and his face on the instant grown genial, he crossed and dropped into a chair beside him. “Needn’t explain, Clifford,” he said pleasantly, offering a cigarette from a lacquered case which Clifford refused. “Sure, I understand what you showed up here for: to see if I went through with what I promised. Well, I just asked for her, and was told she’d gone out. I’m going to wait for her--and I suppose you’ll wait too.” Clifford nodded. Loveman tried to draw Clifford into conversation, but his light remarks failing to evoke a response, he looked through first the “Wall Street Journal,” and then the “Morning Telegraph,” that organ of the theater and the other diversions close to Broadway’s life. Thus the two sat for over an hour, neither speaking; then a page came by, calling in the impersonal voice of hotel pages, “Telegram Mr. Clifford--Telegram Mr. Clifford.” Clifford took the yellow missive with a hand that he tried to keep from shaking. He was quite certain what was in it--the end of things, just as he had suddenly planned them in his new vision of some three or four hours earlier. Yet, none the less, he had a moment of supreme and sickening suspense as he opened the envelope.