She went over the always chance occasions she had seen him. Never alone. She had felt the pointedness of his glances toward her: caught him talking to her mother with a strained interest in her own mood. She had tested this by changing her mood and watching his rapid awareness. He was a curious man: bright, lithe in all senses, unbelievably hard, yet fraught with a glow that she was sure impact might turn to fire. She wandered over his personality. She felt he was too clever and too sensible to be sincere. Yet his standards seemed too directly those of his intelligence and strength to lend reason to insincerity. She did not know. She did know she would have tea with him: and say nothing to her mother. It was easily reasoned. “I’ll control him, myself. If he goes too far or too fast, I’ll have the weapon of a word to Mamma. What a brazen, simple country boy it is!...” She went: she was right at least in this, that Tom had nothing to impart to her “of interest” beyond that he liked her and of course couldn’t see her _really_ at her mother’s. In all else, she was wrong. She could not understand this sudden, cold-passionate man. In writing to Marcia Duffield, he had not understood himself. “Perhaps I’ll know better when I have talked to her across a table.” She came with a spur of adventure. She was trapping her foe. While he reveled in his success, letting his pleasure out, she would enmesh him. Thereafter, should he ever move in a direction she did not like, Marcia would soon show him in whose hands he was. Marcia was so astir with her scheme that she thought herself cool and collected. She had a dogged affection for her mother: a sort of animal loyalty in which was properly admixed a very human loyalty to herself. Here, she was quite sure, there was question only of her mother. Tom, meantime, waited and went over in his mind the impressions in confidence of which he had dared write his letter. “A girl absolutely incapable of carrying an altruistic act to an end ... and yet--a Christian! If she resolved to serve her mother by telling her I was flirting with her daughter--and she is convinced that this would serve her mother: she must be hostile instinctively to her mother’s friend--she would have to be sure, first, she did not care for me. She is coming to-day to find out. It all depends on to-day. If she does not like me she will betray me with a sense of serving her mother. If she does like me, she will take secret delight in making her mother a fool.... Dear little fool herself! If she knew how much I love her black straight hair and her white straight body, how little I care in contrast for her mother’s interest in my future! If she knew--well, she must know.” He went forward, seeing her at the door--seeing the shrewd determination in her face as she came forward to him.