A last second they stood there, so near, so very near together and still so infinitely far apart. Dully, almost ploddingly, the man turned to leave. "Thank you, Elice," he said. "That's probably the last kind word I'll hear for a long time. Perhaps, too, it's justified, perhaps--who knows? Good-night and--good-bye." The girl did not follow him, did not move. "Good-bye, Steve," she echoed. BOOK II CHAPTER I ANTICIPATION "Are you given to remembering dates, Elice?" There had been a pause,--one of the inevitable, normal pauses that occur when two people who are intimate are alone and conversation drifts where it will. Into this particular void, without preamble, entered this question. "Sometimes. Why?" "Not always, then?" "No. I haven't any particular tendency that way that I know of. Possibly I'm not yet old enough for it to develop." "To be more specific, then, to-day is December the sixth." Darley Roberts' eyelids narrowed whimsically. "Does that particular date have any special significance, recall anything out of the ordinary to you?" Elice Gleason glanced up from the four-leafed clover she was bringing to life on the scrap of linen in her lap, and looked at her companion thoughtfully. "From the way you come at me, point blank," she smiled, "I have no doubt it should. Your chance questions, I've discovered, always do have a string attached to them somewhere. But just at this particular moment I admit December the sixth recalls nothing in particular." "Not even when I add, at approximately eight o'clock in the evening? It's that now. I've been consulting the timepiece over there." "No; not even that. I'm more and more convinced it's a distinct lapse on my part; but again I'm compelled to confess incompetency. When did what happen at approximately eight P.M. on December the sixth?" Darley Roberts stroked his great chin with reminiscent deliberation. "On December sixth, at eight o'clock P.M., precisely one year ago," he explained minutely, "a certain man called on a certain young woman of his acquaintance for the first time. It was, I am reliably informed, a momentous occasion for him. Moreover he--Had you really forgotten, Elice?" "Yes--the date." "Strange. I hadn't. Perhaps, though, it meant more to me than to you." He laughed peculiarly. "I fancy I didn't tell you at the time that it was the first call I'd ever made on a young woman in my life." He laughed again with tolerant amusement. "I was thirty-three years old then, too." The girl drew a thread of green from a bundle of silk in her lap deliberately. "No; you never told me that," she corroborated. The wrinkles gathering about Darley Roberts' eyes suddenly deepened, infallible precursor of the unexpected. "By the way," he digressed, "I'm growing curious to know what you do with those things you're embroidering, those--" "Lunch cloths?" "That's it, lunch cloths. The present makes seven, one after the other, you've completed. I've kept count."