She drove out to Columbia Gardens, bought flowers from the conservatory for her rooms, and wandered about recalling the many gay times she had had in the dancing pavilion. But her eye was suddenly arrested by the steep mountain behind, then dropped slowly to the base. It was there that she had promised to marry Gregory Compton. She remembered his young passion and her own. She had never felt anything like it again; nor had he ever been quite the same. Was it one of those “supreme moments” novelists so blithely alluded to? The logical inference of that old bit of bathos was that such moments had no duplicates. She felt faint and dizzy for a moment; then walked back to her car, smiling grimly as she realised that she had experienced a fleeting echo of that vast unattainable desire women live and die cherishing or bewailing. “Poor things! Poor things!” she thought, with the first pang of pity her sex had ever inspired. “No wonder they go in for suffrage, art, work, any old thing. Home,” she added to the chauffeur. She peremptorily dismissed all thought of the past during the drive back to town and reverted to her pleasure in once more feeling a part of her surroundings, hideous though they might, for the most part, be; instead of walking with alert critical eye through what always must seem to her the animated pages of ancient history. But her complacency received a sudden shock. The car was rolling along Park Street when her eye rested upon a man’s face vaguely familiar. She had bowed graciously and the face was behind her before she realised that the man was Professor Whalen, and that, for a second, she had looked into a pair of pale blue eyes that sent her a swift message of hate. Ida shuddered. The warm light air of her beloved Rockies turned cold and heavy. “I feel as if I’d stepped on a snake and just missed getting bitten,” she thought, putting her sensations into a concrete form, after her habit. “I had forgotten the little viper was alive, and I wish to goodness he wasn’t.” She had flouted superstition always, but she could not shake off the sense of menace and evil that had vibrated from the man until she was within her own doors once more. Then she became as oblivious of Whalen’s existence as during that late exotic period when everything connected with her old life had seemed too crude to be real. The parlour maid handed her a note that had arrived an hour before from Mr. Luning, Mark’s partner. Mrs. Blake, he wrote, had bought a present for Mrs. Compton in Paris and sent it to the care of her husband’s firm. Mr. Luning had gone the day before to Great Falls to clear it in the Custom House, and now had the pleasure of forwarding the boxes, etc. “Good gracious!” exclaimed Ida, “what can it be?” “There’s four big boxes in the back hall, ma’am.”