That afternoon, being unable to work, he walked twelve long miles and blistered his feet and tired his legs. He was in bed, weary of both mind and body before it was dark, and the sun was high before he wakened next morning. The world seemed gray and flat. The singing April of inspiration had passed. But he knew that he had broken the back of his work. The foundations of his labor had been laid, and thereafter he felt his toil on those half-completed twenty chapters of The Unwise Virgins must be that work which is done in cold blood, critical, calculating, dispassionate. But the thread of creation was snapped. * * * * * "I thought you were never coming," Cordelia lamented in her unconsciously soft contralto, as he stepped into the Spauldings' large, softly lighted library. He laughed good-naturedly--he felt that a week of brain-work had burned out of him some excess of solemnity--and with boyish precipitancy thrust his twenty rough chapters of The Unwise Virgins into her arms. "Behold my redemption!" he cried gaily, and felt that he should like to follow the twenty chapters and be held there as she held the crumpled leaves to her breast. She had been waiting for him, and was dressed in a gown of old gold with yellow roses at her throat and in her hair. He threw his admiration of the picture she made into the glance he let linger abstractedly on her face. For the first time he noticed some touch of trouble about her quiet lips, a new tiredness about the pleading eyes. "Why didn't you come?" she repeated, looking down as though half ashamed of a weakness she could not conceal. "Upon my honor," he laughed back at her, "I don't believe I should have appeared within a month if it hadn't been for your message." "How could you!" she said reprovingly. "Well, a madness for work got hold of me, and I was up in the clouds. I always have to gallop through things--that's why I didn't want to break into the mood while it lasted." "And it lasted?" "Yes, until your wire came. Then I dropped down, I don't know how, with a bump. It confronted me with the fact that I was still a human being; it revitalized me, as it were, and reminded me that the softest voice in all the world had been calling for me, and the sweetest eyes in all the world had been looking for me." Cordelia shrank back from him; he thought for a moment that he had wounded her. The widened pupils of her eyes had grown smaller again, and the shadow of something fugitive and far away flitted across her face. Was she, he wondered, still so afraid of love? "Then, you didn't finish the story?" she asked diffidently. It seemed the first time that she had shown a desire to repel him. He had stepped closer to her, warm with a feeling he tried neither to fathom nor withhold. At this change in her he stopped short, bewildered. "No." He tried to explain to her. "You said that I _must_ come."