Knowing Rush as he did, he felt his way rapidly toward the facts. Alys, woman-like, had succumbed to propinquity, and betrayed herself; Rush, finding his mere masculine loneliness misinterpreted, and being honourable to boot, had promptly withdrawn. But why? Alys would have made him a delightful and useful wife. She was one of those too clever girls whom celibacy made neurotic and uncertain, but out of whom matrimony and maternity knocked all the nonsense at once and finally. She would make a splendid woman. He should have thought her just the girl to allure Rush, whom he also knew to be fastidious and to set a high value on the good old Brabant blood. Moreover, it was time that Rush would be wanting the permanent companionship of a woman, a bright, progressive, but feminine woman. He had observed certain signs. Alys, apparently, had not measured up to Rush's secret ideal of the wholly desirable woman, nor appealed to that throbbing vein of romanticism which he had striven to bury beneath the dusty tomes of the law. What sort of woman, then, could satisfy all he desired? And had he found her? Broderick recalled a certain knightly exaltation in Rush's blue eyes which had come and gone as they discussed Mrs. Balfame, although not a word of the adroit concept he had built remained in the reporter's memory. But those eyes came back to Broderick there in the dark--the eyes of a man young and ardent like himself--he almost fancied he had seen the woman's image in them. He revived his impression of Mrs. Balfame, seen for the first time to-day, and contemplated it impersonally: A beautiful, a fascinating woman--to a man of Rush's limited experience and idealism; fastidious, proud, gracious, supremely poised. Nor did she look a day over thirty, although she must be a good bit more--he recalled the obituaries of the dead man: they had alluded to his marital accomplishment as covering a term of some twenty years. Perhaps she was his second wife--but no--nor did it matter. Rush was just the sort of chap to fall in love with a woman older than himself, if she were still young in appearance and as chastely lovely, as unapproachable, as Mrs. Balfame. He would idealise her very years, contrast them with that vague suggestion of virginity that Broderick recalled, of deep untroubled tides. All romantic men believe in women's unfathomed depths when in love, reflected the star reporter cynically, and Mrs. Balfame was just the sort to go until forty before having the smashing love affair of her life; and to inspire a similar passion in a hard-working idealist like Dwight Rush. Mrs. Balfame and Dwight Rush! Broderick, who now stood quite still, a few paces from the Crumley gate, whistled. Could Rush have fired that shot? Broderick recalled that the lawyer had mentioned having spent Saturday evening in Brooklyn--on business.