She had felt the sly reproach in Venetia's references to Dr. Coburn. The seedy doctor had drawn her strongly, and yet in the face of her husband's contemptuous indifference to him she had made but one or two feeble attempts to reach him. A few times, also, she had visited the bookbinder's sickly wife, and after the birth of little Francis had revived the class in bookbinding. Jackson had fitted up a studio for the class out of an old teahouse on the bluff, where during mild weather they received their friends in æsthetic informality. But the class had soon dwindled, the young married women of whom it was composed flitting to other pursuits, and the taciturn bookbinder taking offence at a fancied slight suddenly ceased his visits. Some weeks later when Helen called at the Husseys' rooms to see the wife, she found that they had moved away, and having written Dr. Coburn for their address without success, she had made no further attempt to find them. Thus ended her efforts to reach that world which lay outside her own circle. More and more, as her married life went on, she had succumbed to the _milieu_ that her husband had chosen. As his struggle for success grew hotter, she, too, in her way, had been absorbed into it, and had become the domestic and social satellite which he needed in his relations with rich clients. And so Venetia's careless defence of herself pricked her. Was there, after all, anything more admirable in the decent life that she and her husband led with its little circle of selfish activities than in the crude outbreaks of Venetia Phillips which had caused so much perturbation in Forest Park? They were not vicious to be sure,--the people she lived with; they were merely dull and negative. One of these brooding days shortly after the talk on the club veranda, Helen set forth to a neighbor's with a bundle of books and some flowers for Mrs. Buchanan, who was giving a dinner that evening. She had reached the point in the winding road where a long bridge crossed a deep ravine on the level with the topmost branches of lofty trees. At the other end of the bridge a man was standing looking down into the green depths below. He was so much absorbed in the ravine that he did not hear the woman's steps as she drew near. When she passed behind him, he glanced up with a startled look in his black eyes, and grasping the bicycle by his side was moving off. "Don't you remember me, Mr. Hussey?" Helen asked, holding out her hand. "How are you? I am so glad to see you again. Did you ride out all the way from the city? We don't see many bicycles these days." She poured forth her little flood of amiable sentences, while the bookbinder stood quietly holding his wheel. "Yes," he answered slowly, when she paused. "I rode out on my wheel. I wanted to see how the country looked."