“It’s dusty in the Park, and I feel as if I wanted a quick walk home. I like Fifth Avenue when the lights are just coming out,” Mrs. Clephane explained. * * * * * All night long she lay awake in the great bed of the Clephane spare-room, and stared at Chris. While they still faced each other--and after her first confused impression of his having thickened and reddened--she had seen him only through the blur of her fears and tremors. Even after they had parted, and she was walking home with Anne, the shock of the encounter still tingling in her, he remained far off, almost imponderable, less close and importunate than her memories of him. It was as if his actual presence had exorcised his ghost. But now-- He had not vanished; he had only been waiting. Waiting till she was alone in her room in the sleeping house, in the unheeding city. How alone, she had never more acutely felt. Who on earth was there to intervene between them, when there was not a soul to whom she could even breathe that she had met him? She lay in the darkness with terrified staring eyes, and there he stood, his smile deriding her--a strange composite figure, made equally of the old Chris and the new.... It was of no use to shut her eyes; he was between lid and ball. It was of no use to murmur disjointed phrases to herself, conjure him away with the language of her new life, with allusions and incantations unknown to him; he just stood there and waited. Well, then--she would face it out now, would deal with him! But how? What was he to her, and what did he want of her? Yes: it all came to the question of what he wanted; it always had. When had there ever been a question of what _she_ wanted? He took what he chose from life, gathered and let drop and went on: it was the artist’s way, he told her. But what could he possibly want of her now, and why did she imagine that he wanted anything, when by his own showing he was so busy and so provided for?