But, when the hot night came, and the day’s warfare was over, there would ever come upon Conover an odd sense of emptiness, of lonely depression. More than once, absent-mindedly, he caught himself planning to banish the feeling by picking up his hat and hurrying across to Desirée’s home. Then, with a slight shock, he would remember that Desirée was in the Adirondacks and that he was--alone. He had always known the absent girl was necessary to his happiness; that without her he was a loveless, unlovable financial machine. But now he realized with a sick ache at his heart how utterly he had grown to depend upon her actual presence--on the constant knowledge that she was near. When this, his first clumsy effort at self-analysis, had been worked out, Caleb laughed at himself for a fool. But there was as little merriment in the laugh as with most mortals who seek to evoke self-amusement from the same cause. It was in one of these desolate moods, after a twelve-hour day’s ceaseless work, that it occurred to Conover one evening to call on Letty Standish. He had not for a moment abandoned his idea of making her his wife. But that would come in due time; and meanwhile he had been busy with matters that could not be so readily postponed. True, he had at last paid the deferred dinner call. But Miss Standish, the butler had said, was not at home. Twice he had repeated the visit, and both times had been met by the same message. This did not strike him as at all peculiar. In summer, people were apt to be out of doors. Perhaps to-night he might find her at home. At all events, the walk would lighten his loneliness. Painfully donning his highest collar, gayest tie and new cream-colored crash suit, the Fighter turned his face toward Pompton Avenue. As he neared the Standish house, the murmur of voices, occasional bursts of low laughter and the idle twanging of a guitar reached his ears. Several people were grouped on the piazza. So interested were they in a story one of their number was telling that Caleb stood on the topmost step before his approach was noticed. Letty, following eagerly each tone of the narrator’s voice, in search of the psychological moment for laughing, looked up to see Conover towering over her, bulking huge against the dying dusk. Her involuntary little cry brought the story to a premature close. It was Caine, who, sitting back among the shadows, rose as usual to the situation. “Hello, old chap!” he said, cordially, as he came forward, “You loomed up before us like a six-by-four ghost. Letty,--” Miss Standish had recovered herself sufficiently to welcome the late arrival with a deprecatory effort at cordiality and to introduce him to three or four young people of the neighborhood who dropped in for an informal summer’s evening chat.