All Saturday night she had sleeplessly tossed, knowing that Quentin Charter was speeding eastward, and dreading the moment when he should arrive in the city and find no welcoming note from her. She dared not be in her rooms after he was due to reach the _Granville_, lest he call her by telephone or messenger--and her purpose of not seeing him be destroyed by some swift and salient appeal. She had waited until after the hour in which he had asked to call, to be sure that this time he would have given up all hope of seeing her. The prospect now of entering her apartment and remaining there throughout the night, challenged every ounce of will-force she possessed.... Battling with loneliness and bereavement, as she had been for hours, Paula was grateful to note, by the open door, that the actress was at home, even though she had left her the evening before, hurt and disappointed by the other's swift change of manner upon learning that Quentin Charter was to be in New York to-day.... It was with a startling but indefinable emotion that she heard the man's voice now through the open door. Stephen Cabot was there, she thought, as she softly let herself in to the place of ordeals, which her own flat had become. In the dark and silence of the inner hall, the old enemy swept into her consciousness--again the awful localizations of the preying force! The usual powers of mind scattered, as in war the pith of a capital's garrisons rush forth to distant borders. By habit, her hand was upon the button, but she did not turn on light. Instead, she drew back, steeling her will to remember her name, her place in the world, her friends. Harshly driven, yet Paula repressed a cry, and fought her way out into the main hall--as from the coiling suction of a maelstrom. Even in her terror, she could not but repress a swift sense of victory, in that she had escaped from the vortex of attraction--her own rooms. The man's voice reached her again, filled her mind with amazing resistance--so that the point of the occultist's will was broken. Suddenly, she remembered that she had once heard Stephen Cabot, protesting that he was quite well--at the end of the first New York performance of _The Thing_, and that his tones were inseparably identified with his misfortune. The voice she heard now thrilled her like an ancient, but instantly familiar, harmony. It was not Stephen Cabot's. She stood at the open door, when the vehemence of Selma Cross, who was now speaking, caused her to refrain from making her presence known. The unspeakable possibility, suddenly upreared in her mind, banished every formality. The full energies of her life formed in a prayer that she might be wrong, as Paula peered through the inner hall, and for the first time in the flesh glimpsed Quentin Charter.