The change in her, the loss of what good looks she had once possessed, did not diminish or alter his feeling. If he had been asked if he thought her pretty he would have honestly said he did not know, he had never thought about it. He did not know how old she was, nor could he cite any special points of beauty that his eye, as a lover, had noted. Her only physical attribute that had impressed him was her smallness, and this he had noticed because in walking with her, her head only came to a little above his shoulder, and he was sometimes forced to bend down to hear her. He had been wondering what to do when the Colonel asked him to call. Unless the suggestion had come from some one in authority he never would have dared to go, for he was a lover at once proud and shy, not of the kind who batter and browbeat a woman into acquiescence. Her first meeting with him, dominated as it was by mutual embarrassment, at least showed him that she was not displeased to see him. Since then the meetings had been frequent, her pleasure at his coming open for any one to see, and Rion’s hopes, in the beginning but faint, had waxed high and exultant. To June, he and the Colonel were the only two figures of an intimate interest in her life. He seemed to fill its emptiness, to cheer its isolation. She looked forward to his coming, hardly knowing why, except that a sense of comfort and strength came with him. He was often in her thoughts, and she found herself storing up small incidents in her daily life to tell him, for no reason but that his unspoken sympathy was pleasant. She felt the consciousness--so sweet to women--that all which concerned her was of moment to him. Now and then the Colonel’s past assertions that the girl who married Rion Gracey would be happy, rose in her mind. She began to understand that it might be so, and what it would mean, this strong man’s love and protection guarding a woman against the storm and struggle of the world, with which she personally was so unfitted to cope. One evening, a month after the wedding, he found her sitting on the balcony reading. It had been warm weather for a day or two and the windows and doors of the lower floor were thrown open, showing the receding vista of dimly-lighted rooms and passages. She was dressed in white and had a book he had given her lying open across her knees. As the gate clicked to his opening hand she started and looked down, then leaned forward, her face flushing, her lips parting with a smile of greeting. It was a look that might have planted hope in any man’s heart. “I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said, gazing down on him as he ascended. “I was just wondering if you would. When you want a thing very much it never seems to happen. But now you’ve happened, so I never can say that again.” “Yes, I’ve happened,” he answered with the phlegmatic air with which he hid his shyness. “Are you all alone again?”