"You are musing, Henry," Moravia's voice went on. "Are you thinking over what I said? I hope so, and you will find it is true. See, I will tell you what to visualize there in the fire. You are looking at a splendid English home, all peace and warmth, and you see yourself in it happy and surrounded by friends. And you see yourself a great man, the center of political interest, and everything coming toward you that heart can desire. It is awfully wanting in common sense to think because you cannot obtain one woman there are none others in the world." "Awfully," agreed Henry--suddenly taking in the attractive picture she made, seated there at his knees, her white hand holding his hand. His thoughts wandered for a moment, as thought will do when the mind is overstrained; they wandered to the speculation of why American women should have such small and white hands, and then he brought himself back to the actual conversation. "You mean to tell me," he said, "that if every time I remember, when I am dwelling upon the subject which pains me, that I must make my thoughts turn to other things which give me pleasure, that gradually the new thoughts will banish the old?" "Of course, I mean that," Moravia told him. "Everything comes in cycles; that is why people get into habits. You just try, Henry; you can cure the habit of pain as easily as you can cure any habit. It is all a question of will." She saw that she had created interest in his eyes, and rejoiced. That crisis had passed! and it would be safe to go on. "I shall not get him to kiss me to-night, after all," she decided to herself. "If I did, he would probably feel annoyed to-morrow, with some ridiculous sense of a too sudden disloyalty to Sabine's memory--and he might be huffed with himself, too, thinking he had given way; it might wound his vanity. I shall just draw him right out and make him want to kiss me, but not consciously--and then it will be safe when he is at that pitch to let him go off to bed." This plan she proceeded to put into practice. She exploited the subject they had been talking of to its length, and aroused a sharp discussion and argument--while she took care to place herself in the most alluring attitudes as close to Henry as she possibly could be, while maintaining a basis of frank friendship, and then she changed the current by getting him to explain to her exactly what he had done about Michael, and how they should arrange the meeting between the two, putting into her eagerness all the sparkle that she would have used in collaborating with him over the placing of the presents upon a Christmas tree--until, at last, Henry began to take some sort of pride in the thing itself.