"It is not final," she explained. "Do take it as a postponement, nothing more. He has his reasons--oh, they are not what you suspect. He is not jealous. He is too big for that. It is something I can not go into now." Her sentences were disjointed. She seemed almost incoherent to him. "Let it be so for the present. I implore, no, I insist, that there be no explanations. But I must go, it is getting late," she started as if to rise; then sank back in her chair and held out her hand. "Oh, the amulet, Eugene." "I haven't got it," he threw out both empty hands and looked up at her from under his brows with the expression of a naughty child. "Now listen, Dita, before you get angry, although you're so wonderful when you're angry that any one might be forgiven for tempting you into that state; but after you called me up, the Nasmyths, those English people you know, mother and daughter, were at the studio, and I was so intent on getting them away in time to meet you, the mother is the most interminable talker, that I finally bundled them out of the door and came with them, with never a thought of the amulet." "'Gene, how like you!" Her face was full of dismay. "Cresswell especially asked me to get it to-day, and I don't think he believed for one moment that clumsy fib I told about having it mended." "I'll go at once and get it, and bring it to the house," he said contritely. "You can make any explanation--" "No, no more explanations," she said decisively. "They are perfect spider-webs, the most involving things any poor fly can tangle himself up in. They are, to mix metaphors, the quicksands of any situation. They make of the simplest matter a problem of complexities." "What does that go for?" Gresham tilted his head on one side and studied her. "Does it mean that you and Hepworth quarreled about me, last night?" She looked back at him in inscrutable pondering, as if considering the point, wondering, in fact, whether she and her husband really had quarreled about him. "No explanations, Eugene, that's fixed." "As you will," in careless assent. "But, Dita," again that ardent note of tenderness, warming his voice, and stirring her heart with all those intimations of romance which she had never known. "We might as well accept the inevitable, accept it with joy, face the light quite fearlessly. We might as well see clearly at last, what for years we should have known and believed and welcomed with all our hearts--that we belong to each other." Her quickly lowered eyelids veiled the sudden glow of her eyes. "Perhaps," she whispered, "only I want time to think it out, to be sure of myself. I--I've grown cautious."