"They can keep it up till morning for all I care--I shall not come!" Zillinger threw up his hands and rushed away, mopping his face and muffling his oaths with the same handkerchief. Cordelia's hand sought Hartley's in the dusk of the half-lighted box. "Bully!" was the only word he said, but she understood how much it meant, and it made her inordinately happy for all the rest of that night. She felt, in some way, that her life had approached its Great Divide. CHAPTER XVIII THE FULNESS OF LIFE He, with his blithe young bosom warm, Quite mad as any hatter, Just pipes and jigs through every storm, So _what_ can winter matter! JOHN HARTLEY, "The Robin in Winter." A great man? Impossible; he hasn't a dozen enemies!--"The Silver Poppy." Those should have been happy days for Hartley, yet they were not. As to just why they were not he had decided to hold question with himself no longer. He was persuading himself to pick the flower, distrustful of his to-morrow. He and Cordelia saw a great deal of each other, though he was puzzled often by the Indian Summer mood of tranquillity which seemed to have settled down upon her. Though no lightest word of love passed between them, she seemed to cling to him with a broken autumnal forlornness that touched him more than once as time went on. Several days out of the week he dined with the Spauldings, and as the season advanced and the play-houses opened he saw himself more and more often a member of their merry little theater parties. They went once or twice to Cordelia's play, but her novel in its dramatized form was only a lukewarm success at its best, and was soon withdrawn. Yet going out "on the road" as "a New York triumph," it mysteriously took unto itself new life and prospered with sedate but substantial vigor. Day by day Hartley's circle of acquaintances had enlarged--he became, in fact, a more or less popular young man--and he found it distinctly agreeable to catch an occasional smile from a carriage passing in the Park or on Riverside Drive, and to bow now and then to a familiar face on the crowded Avenue--there is only one. It was pleasant, too, to hold the reins and have Cordelia at his side in the Spauldings' spider phaeton, driving quietly home through the waning autumnal evenings after happy afternoons in the sun and open air.