She had become intensely proud of her husband since her return, and his neglect, coupled with his scrupulous generosity, had stung her pride and aroused both desire and determination to recapture what she had lost. She had no great faith in her capacity for love; but not only was she fascinated by Gregory for the first time but she found him more worthy of her accomplished coquetry than any man she had met in Europe. She was firm in her resolve to repossess her husband, but not merely to satisfy that pride which was the evolution of a more primitive vanity; she felt a certain joyousness, a lilt of the spirit, at the thought of spending her life with him, of being the complete helpmate of such a man; even a disposition to dream, which was so new in her experience that she banished it with a frown. “If I let go like other fool women, I’ll make a grand mess of it,” was her characteristic reflection. She was dressing for the dinner when she heard him enter the house. The parlour maid for once remembered her instructions, and led him up to his room, which was on the opposite side of the hall from his wife’s and at the extreme end. Her door was ajar, she heard his voice--whose depth and richness were decimated by the telephone--his light foot ascending the stair. For the moment she lost her breath, then with an angry jerk of the shoulders regained her poise, and, in tones careless enough to reassure any husband suddenly overwhelmed with the awkwardness of his position, called out: “Good evening, Gregory. Hope you’ll find everything you want in your room. Ring if you don’t. See you downstairs.” “Oh--thanks!” Gregory swallowed an immense sigh of relief. “I’ll be on time.” Ida, assisted by the “upstairs girl”--she had not yet found a ladies’ maid willing to come to Butte--continued her toilette. Her gown was as nearly Renaissance as she thought her native Northwest would stand at this stage of her social progress. It was “built”--a word more appropriate to woman’s dress A.D. 1600 than today--of heavy turquoise-blue brocade, the design outlined here and there with gold thread. The long wrinkled sleeves almost covered her hands, and, like the deep square of the neck, were tipped with fur. Her mass of blue-black hair was closely twisted around her head from brow to the nape of her neck, held above the low forehead by a jewelled stiletto Ora had given her in Genoa, “to remind her of her midnight diversions in the Renaissance palace over which her dim ancestral memories brooded.” This she had dismissed as damn nonsense, but she liked the stiletto with its rudely set stones, and had promised to wear it the first time she got inside one of her near-Renaissance gowns.