Again twilight in mid-afternoon--as he crossed the river from Jersey. It had been a day and night to age the soul--with its inexorable stretch of material miles. New York had a different look, a different atmosphere, than ever before. Huge and full of horrible grinding; sick with work and sick with damp--but above this, the magic of her presence was over all. It was only four in the afternoon, and he had not asked to see her until seven. Might she not have watched for him or be near him now? She would know him from his pictures, and observe him as a stranger, but he had only his visions. On the Cross-town to the _Granville_, emotions played upon him of a kind that he could not have understood in another man a few months before. Moreover, he felt himself giving way before the vibrations of the big city. Harried and shrunken, he was, like a youth from the fields; and the voice he had raised so valiantly from afar against this tremendous massed soul, seemed now but the clamor of a boy in the safety of his own door. To and fro along his inflamed nerves crept the direct need of a drink and a cigarette--old wolves forever on the watch for the spent and the wounded.... Actually terrorized, he was, at the thought she might not see him; that there might be no note for him at the _Granville_. What a voyage in the dark. For the time, his excellent moral balance had deserted shamelessly. An adequate perception of his own position and attitude in the eyes of high womanhood had unhelmed him, quite properly. Nature had finally found a hot retort which just fitted his case--and in he went.... No purely physical ardor could have called Quentin Charter out of his study and far across the continent. Lesser loves than this have plunged nations into war, and broken the main trend of history into pregnant digressions. The more penetratingly one regards the man in his present consuming, the more formidable becomes the conviction that the human cosmos in the beginning was cleft in twain: one to grope to the light, a male; the other to suffer the way, her burden, the curse of Eve. When these mates of fire fulfil their divided destinies and sweep into the zone of mutual attraction, woe to the satellites and asteroids in the inevitable cataclysm which follows.... Yet it is out of such solar throes that gods and prophets are born.... He gave his bag to a boy at the _Granville_ entrance, and stepped forward to the desk, clearing his throat and repeating his question.... The clerk rushed through the letters in "C." "No, Mr. Charter,--not a letter, but wait just a moment; there was a telephone-call." A chill had swept through him as the man spoke. It had not occurred to him that the word would come in other than her handwriting. This was an unsigned note, written by the telephone-girl: Mr. Quentin Charter: A lady who says you will understand, 'phoned that she will be home at seven to-night--if you think it wise and kind to come to her.