Odd went to meet Hilda on Thursday, Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday. The distances were always great, and he insisted on cabs for the return trip. Palamon must be tired, even if Hilda were not. He was too old for such journeyings; and Hilda had smilingly to submit. Wednesday would end it all definitely; Peter thought that he saw the end with unmixed satisfaction, and yet when Allan Hope walked into his rooms early on Wednesday morning, this Perseus of Hilda's womanhood gave the Perseus of her childhood a really unpleasant turn of the blood. There was something irritating in Allan Hope's absolute fitness for the _rôle_, emphasizing, as it did, Peter's own unfitness, his forty years, and his desultory life. Active energy, the go-ahead perseverance that knows no doubts, the honest and loyal convictions which were all arranged for him from his cradle, and which he would bequeath to his children unaltered, all things that make for order and well-being, looked at one from Lord Allan's clear, light eyes. Odd suddenly felt himself to be an uncertain cumberer of the earth; failure personified beside the other's air of inevitable success. He was fond of Hope and Hope fond of him, and they talked as old friends talk, with the intimacy that time brings; an intimacy far removed from the strong knittings of sympathy that an hour may accomplish; for, though Odd understood Allan very well, Allan did not muddle his direct views of things by a comprehension that implied condonation. He thought it rather a pity that Odd had not made more of his life. Odd's books weren't much good that he could see; better do something than write about the things other men have done. Odd felt that Allan was probably quite right. They hardly spoke of Hilda, but in Hope's congratulations on Peter's engagement there was a ring of heartfelt brotherly warmth that implied much, and left Peter in a gloomy rage with himself for feeling miserable. Peter had not analyzed the darks and glooms of the last few days. Growth does not admit of much self-contemplation. One wakes suddenly to the accomplished change. If Peter was conscious of developments, he defined them as morbid enlargements of that self-doubt which would naturally thrill under the stress of new responsibilities. Only from the force of newly formed habit did he go to the Rue Poulletier that afternoon, hardly expecting to meet Hilda. But Hilda had, as yet, not interrupted her usual avocations. She emerged from the gloomy portals of one of the old dismantled-looking _hôtels_ that line the Rue Poulletier with a certain dignity, and she looked toward the corner where he stood with a confident glance. It was the second time he had met her there, twice in the Rue d'Assas too. "It is so kind of you," she said, as she joined him and they turned into the _quai_; "only you mustn't think that you _must_, you know." "_May_ I think that I _must_? Give me the assurance of necessity. I am always a little afraid of seeming officious."