Her toilet was an exceptionally elaborate one, and it was almost seven before she tapped lightly on Mrs. Spaulding's door. Dismay crept through her as she entered; she immediately recognized all the familiar symptoms. "I've got one of my heads again, my dear. I'm sorry, but I _can't_ go." Cordelia looked at her with compressed lips. "You'll _have_ to run along by yourself, my dear. It'll be all right, and I'll send Thomas with the brougham at nine." * * * * * Hartley was deep in a pile of disordered notes and manuscripts, trying to arrange them with some sort of method, when her tiny knock sounded on his apartment door. He did not hear it; it might never have been intended for his hearing, it was so light and timorous. Before he was even aware of her presence everything had been slipped in through the softly opened door. And when he suddenly looked up he saw her standing there laughing, expectant, radiant, a Lady Bountiful surrounded by her riches. He started up and came quickly toward her. He had scarcely looked for them so soon. But she stopped him with a gesture. "I've come alone," she warned him. And she told him how she had been deserted at the last moment. She was glad, and yet sorry--as she saw how his face lighted up--that he should look at it so joyously innocent. "I have come to feed the lion," she cried. "Roar if you dare, sir!" She slipped off her wrap, and laying her hat and gloves aside, deftly placed a couple of Hartley's carnations in her hair. Noticing over her shoulder that he was watching her, she laughingly told him the different names the newspapers had given that poor head of hers--everything from "flame-washed" and "tawny russet" to "beaten bronze." Then she laughed again softly, and produced a mysterious parcel. "Roll up my sleeves, sir!" she demanded prettily, standing before him. When this was done, and he had noticed how small but perfectly rounded her white arm was, she opened her parcel and shook out the whitest of white aprons. "Dear, dear, isn't it fine?" she cried, jubilantly tiptoeing so that she could see herself in the mirror. Hartley looked at her in wonder. The last little complaining voice of a disturbed conscience went scurrying back to its kennel. Any constraint that had hung over him disappeared. With one whisk of her silk skirt Cordelia seemed to have driven the quietness and loneliness from the little rooms. It was the pale and fragile priestess of letters in a new and altogether unexpected light. He even had to confess to himself that he had never seen her make a more perfect picture. She seemed more softly womanly, more wistfully happy, than ever before. The missing note had been found. She herself was not unconscious of this, and it deepened the rose-tint on her usually pallid cheeks. And she took a strange joy in her novel tasks, as she bustled about laying out the things in a most housewifely manner.