With the disingenuousness of a woman in love, with the timidity of a little mouse, Rachel had established herself under the eaves of an obscure garret in lower New York. For a time, following the change, her heart had beat more tranquilly, for now the same sky covered her that covered that egoistic remarkable being who had once played so important a role in her life. But gradually the sombreness of a storm was created within her; though when she thought of the inventor she experienced little of the chagrin of a woman whom a lover has deserted. Rather, what she felt was a surprised resentment of soul. Emil St. Ives was ordained to understand her, and behold he had forsaken her! With eyes as clear as a child's, though shadowed by indefinable emotions, she often watched from the window the pigeons circling on pointed wings over the house-tops, and they seemed to her like a flurry of white letters tossed by a derisive hand through the sky. "Why had he never written her?" At the thought her melancholy was crossed by anger; but at other moments she remembered that it was she herself who had sent him away. Oh, if he had only looked at her with his mind as well as his eyes! But, enlivened continually by the astonished happy perception of the inventor's mastery of the expedients he employs in his tests, joyful with the joy of a creator, Emil had never really seen her. His love for his mother carried him backward into the past, his love for his work carried him forward into the future, until it actually seemed to her he had no present, no to-day. And she reflected that under one of those million roofs he was working on some foolish instrument for which the world, as yet, did not recognize its own need. The world, therefore, in all probability, was leaving him alone, to live if he could, to starve if he must. Meanwhile, the sound of his drilling, his hammering, above all, his loud-voiced singing, was doubtless causing a commotion among the stars where the important is recorded before it is heralded on this commonplace earth. Although she did not wish to remember the inventor, the thought of him constantly returned and gradually she began to extract a kind of pleasure from this involuntary analysis which she carried on for hours together. Then roused by some sound from the street, with the languor which results from power held in abeyance, she would resume work on the shades.