Anne had resolutely refused to have either bridesmaids or the conventional family dinner of the bridal eve. She wanted to strip the occasion of all its meaningless formalities, and Chris Fenno was of the same mind. He was to spend the evening alone with his parents at their hotel, and Anne had invited no one but Fred Landers to dine. She had warned her mother that she might be a little late in getting home, and had asked her, in view of Mr. Landers’s excessive punctuality, to be downstairs in time to receive and pacify him. Mrs. Clephane had seen through the simple manœuvre, and had not resented it. After all, it would be the best opportunity to tell Fred Landers what she had decided to tell him. As she sat by the drawing-room fire listening for the door-bell she felt a curious sense of aloofness, almost of pacification. It might be only the quiet of exhaustion; she half-suspected it was, but she was too exhausted to feel sure. Yet one thing was clear to her; she had suffered less savagely since she had known that Dr. Arklow had guessed what she was suffering. The problem had been almost too difficult for him; but it was enough that he had perceived its difficulty, had seen that it was too deeply rooted in living fibres to be torn out without mortal hurt. “Sterile pain ... I should never want any one to be the cause of sterile pain....” That phrase of his helped her even now; her mind clung fast to it as she sat waiting for Landers’s ring. It came punctually, even sooner than the hour, as Anne had foreseen; and in another moment he was advancing across the room in his slow bulky way, with excuses for his early arrival. “But I did it on purpose. I was sure Anne would be late--” “Anne! She isn’t even in--” “I knew it! They’re all a pack of vagabonds. And I hoped you’d be punctual,” he continued, letting himself down into an armchair as if he were lowering a bale of goods over the side of a ship. “After all, you and I belong to the punctual generation.” She winced a little at being so definitely relegated to the rank where she belonged. Yes: he and she were nearly of an age. She remembered, in her newly-married precocity, thinking of him as a shy shambling boy, years younger than herself. Now he had the deliberate movements of the elderly, and though he shot, fished, played golf, and kept up the activities common to his age, his mind, in maturing, had grown heavier, and seemed to have communicated its prudent motions to his body. She shut her eyes for a second from the vision. Her own body still seemed so supple, free and imponderable. If it had not been for her looking-glass she would never have known she was more than twenty. She glanced up at the clock; a quarter to eight. Very likely Anne would not be back for another half hour. How would the evening ever drag itself to an end?