Strange letters these to receive in the old-fashioned quiet of Eden Row, where days passed orderly and marshaled by duties! They came fluttering to him beneath the gray London skies, like tropic birds which had lost their direction. He would sit picturing her in an Eden Row setting, telling himself stories of the wild combinations of circumstances that might bring her tripping to him! He was homesick for the faeries. He felt dull in remembering her intenser modes of living--modes of living which in his heart he distrusted. They could not last. There lay his hope. When they failed, she might turn to him for security. He excused her carelessness. Why, because he was sad, should she not be glad-hearted? For such leniency he received an occasional reward, as when she wrote him, “I do wish I could hear your nice English voice. I met a lady the other day who asked me, ‘Is there any chance of your marrying Theodore Gurney? If you don’t, you’re foolish.’ You’d have loved her.” And then, in a mischievous postscript, “I forgot to tell you, she said you had beautiful eyes.” Tantalizing as an echo of laughter from behind a barrier of hills! In her first letters she coquetted with various forms of address: _Meester Deek; Dear Meester Deek; My Dear_. This last seemed to please her as a perch midway between the chilliness of friendship and too much fervor. She settled down to it. Her endings were equally experimental: _Your Friend Desire; Your Little Friend; Yours of the White Foxes; Yours affectionately, the Princess_. Usually her signature was preceded by some such sentiment as, “You know you always have my many thoughts”--which might mean anything. She never committed herself. His chief anxiety was to discover what she had meant by her promise that they would meet very shortly. She refused to tell him. Worse still, as time went on, he suspected that she was missing him less and less. While to him no happiness was complete without her, she seemed to be embarrassed by no such curtailment. Her good times were coming thick and fast; her infatuation for Fluffy seemed to have strengthened. At last word reached him in February that they were off to California; she was too full of anticipation to express regret for the extra three thousand miles that would part them. On the day before she started, he cabled the florist at the Brevoort to send her flowers. In return he received a line of genuine sentiment. “Meester Deek, you are thoughtful! I nearly cried when I got them. You’ll never know what they meant. New York hasn’t been New York without you. It was almost as though you yourself had brought them. I wanted to run out and stop you, waving and waving to you down the stairs.”