But time was flying. It was after three; the headache was still pounding in her temples, and her eyes did look almost as haggard and her skin almost as sallow as her grandmother had said. She took an anti-pyrene powder from a box in her dressing-table, threw off all her clothes, swathed herself in a long robe of pale-blue silk. She locked the door into the hall, and went into her bedroom, closed the door between. She put the powder in water, drank it, dropped down upon a lounge at the foot of her bed and covered herself. The satin pillow against her cheek, the coolness and softness of the silk all along and around her body, were deliciously soothing. Her blood beat less fiercely, and somber thoughts drew slowly away into a vague cloud at the horizon of her mind. Lying there, with senses soothed by luxury and deadened to pain by the drug, she felt so safe, so shut-in against all intrusion. In a few hours the struggle, the bitterness would begin again; but at least here was this interval of repose, of freedom. Only when she was thus alone did she ever get that most voluptuous of all sensations--freedom. Freedom and luxury! "I'm afraid I can't eat my cake and have it, too," she mused drowsily. "Well--whether or not I can have freedom, at least I MUST have luxury. I'm afraid Grant can't give me nearly all I want--who could?... If I had the courage--Craig could make more than Grant has, if he were put to it. I'm sure he could. I'm sure he could do almost anything--but be attractive to a woman. No, Craig is too strong a dose--besides, there's the risk. Grant is safest. Better a small loaf than--than no Paris dresses." Arkwright, entering Mrs. Severence's drawing-room with Craig at half-past five, found a dozen people there. Most of them were of that young married set which Margaret preferred, to the anger and disgust of her grandmother and against the entreaties of her own common sense. "The last place in the world to look for a husband," Madam Bowker had said again and again, to both her daughter and her granddaughter. "Their talk is all in ridicule of marriage, and of every sacred thing. And if there are any bachelors, they have come--well, certainly not in search of honorable wedlock." The room was noisily gay; but Margaret, at the tea-table in a rather somber brown dress with a big brown hat, whose great plumes shadowed her pale, somewhat haggard face, was evidently not in one of her sparkling moods. The headache powder and the nap had not been successful. She greeted Arkwright with a slight, absent smile, seemed hardly to note Craig, as Arkwright presented him. "Sit down here beside Miss Severence," Grant said. "Yes, do," acquiesced Margaret; and Joshua thought her cold and haughty, an aristocrat of the unapproachable type, never natural and never permitting others to be natural. "And tell her all about yourself," continued Grant.