To assure herself whether, after all, she might not be overrating its importance, she wore the silken lure home under her street-dress the evening of the dinner. This candid course was most efficacious. In the light of the miracle it worked, consistency troubled her no more than Amy. Its influence transcended the material; it fortified her courage; and when at last the admiring maid brought word that a gentleman waited below, she gave a final glance mirrorward, which was almost optimistic, and went down for Craig's verdict with starry eyes. No faintest premonition prepared her to confront in the dim-lit room, not Craig, but Paul. The dentist took an uncertain step toward her. "I had to come, Jean," he said defensively. "There hasn't been a more miserable cuss in the city. I--" Then, seeing her clearly under the flare of the gas-burner nearest the door, which her hand sought instantly, he stood a moment, wide-eyed and mute, in fascinated survey of her unwonted garb. No tribute to its effectiveness could be more sincere. As if it spoke for her like a symbol, answering a question he could no longer put, he made a simple gesture of renunciation, the pathos and dignity of which sounded the very well-springs of her pity. "Excuse me for butting in," he added. "I can see now it was no use." Jean put out her hand. The mystery of her dead affection--she could not call it love--for this man was never more baffling. The woman she was seemed as far removed from her who pledged herself to Paul, as that girl in turn was remote from the mutinous rebel of Cottage No. 6; but the dentist's gesture, his words, his shabbiness--so different from the half-dandified neatness of old--touched her where a direct appeal to their common past would have found her flint. "It was no use in the way you mean, Paul," she said gently. "But sit down. I am sorry if you have been unhappy." Whereupon an inconceivably subdued Paul Bartlett sat down beside her and with a gush of mingled self-pity and remorse poured the tale of his manifold sorrows into an absorbed and--her wrongs, her sex considered--sympathetic ear. Life had fared ill with the dentist. He had not been able, he said, to swing the enterprise of the new office quite as he had hoped. The location was all right, the equipment was all right, but for some reason, perhaps the election-time flurry, perhaps because he himself may not have pushed things as he did when feeling quite up to par, patients had not flocked his way. The hell he had been through! To know there wasn't a more up-to-date office in Harlem, not one that paid a stiffer rent, and yet, for a month, six weeks, two months, to see almost nobody drift in except "shoppers"--Jean would remember their sort!--who haggled over dinkey little jobs such as amalgam fillings, or beat him down on a cheap plate to a figure that hardly paid a man to fire up his vulcanizer--well, he'd sooner handle a pick and shovel than go through that again.