I watched her slowly raise one hand and unclasp it; I saw within a small, a very small, white paper thing, which she held closer to her face and gaped at, as if she couldn’t believe the truth of what she saw. “What is it? What is the matter, Miss Haviland?” I asked. “Nothing,” she answered, quite calmly.... “_Listen!_ Don’t you hear—” But she shuddered. “They’ll be coming, Miss Haviland. Really! You’ve no time left.” “Yes.” She tried to smile. It was uncanny. It was hardly more than a distension of her pale wide lips—a relic, merely, of spent resourcefulness. Then the blankness went out of her face, her expression collapsed, and she sobbed aloud. “Miss Haviland! Miss Haviland! Do let me help you,” I begged, and I put my arm through hers and led her inside the swinging door and up the narrow stairs. “Mayn’t I do _anything_?” She dragged herself heavily on by my side. But her sobs ceased after the first flight. At the meager landing before her door she broke away and stood erect and faced me and held out her hand. The abruptness of the change in her awed me. I watched her push the hair from over her face and tilt her head back and shake it and gather the folds of the kimono nonchalantly together; and resume the old hard connoisseurship I had seen her exercise from the beginning. Her eyes dilated tensely, and her eyebrows went tensely up, and she gave me that envisaging smile as of yore. “It was nothing,” she said, “quite nothing. Won’t you step in and wait?... I’m tired, I expect. I was alone here, do you see, taking my bath. The servants” (Mrs. Edgerton’s servants!) “hadn’t come. And that knock on the door upset me. I thought—I thought—it might be—the—the caterer” (she winced at the word, and the wince seemed to help her to proceed) “with the food. So I hurried out and down like mad.... Thanks awfully, though. You’ll be back, surely? Please do.” I did go back, of course. I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds—sad as it was. There wasn’t such a long interval to wait, either. I wended my way, and found the theme-box closed, and returned at about quarter past five. When I entered, the assemblage was in full swing, and Marian Haviland, in the black afternoon toilette she had sent to New York for in honor of Hurrell Oaks’s visit, was scintillating in the midst. She had donned her pearls, and subdued her cheeks unbecomingly, and tinted her lips; and, going from one person to another, she would, in response to the indiscriminating compliments they bestowed, just tap them each gaily on the shoulder with her fan and explain that: “Mr. Oaks was so sorry, but he couldn’t wait. Yes, he was wonderful,” she would say, “_perfectly_. We had an immemorial hour together. I shall never forget it—_never_.”