"I merely pretended to myself that he had," she frankly admitted now. "His movement was nothing more than the natural muscular action of a man bracing himself for an effort." She herself, Cynthia, had not been, she felt sure, at that moment, in the remotest of his thoughts. "If Harry had changed toward me as I have toward him," she argued, "he would have looked up, not only because he wanted to, but because he would have remembered what I had said to him on that very point the afternoon when he asked me to marry him." But in spite of her conviction she rejoiced. Some kinship she could claim with Juliet. For all her longing was to give and to give, and still to give. She had sought desperately for color in her life. She had welcomed politics in the hunt for it. She had it now and to spare--enough to daub the world. The handle of the door was tried and through the panels her astonished maid told her the hour. Cynthia sprang up and unlocked it. "I shall dine at home to-night," she said. "The cook must get me some dinner, anything." The maid reminded Cynthia that she had arranged to dine with some friends and visit a theatre. "I know," said Cynthia. She had made the plan so that she might not spend in loneliness the anxious hours of this evening. But since she had made the plan the world had changed its hues. "You must telephone and say that I can't come," said Cynthia, remorselessly, as she ran upstairs. Whilst she dressed she considered what she should do with this wonderful evening. She meant to spend it alone--yes, but that did not quite content her. Somehow it should be made memorable. Something she must do which, but for this day of days, she never would have done. Something which must not merely mark it as a harbor boom marks a turn of the channel, but must be the definite consequence of it. Cynthia, in a word, went down to her solitary dinner much more akin than she had ever been since to the girl who, eager for life with the glorious eagerness of youth, had run down the stairs on the morning of her seventeenth birthday into the dining-room of the Daventry estancia. Half-way through dinner the thing to do, in order fitly to commemorate the day, came to her in a burst of light. She went back to Harry's study and sitting at his writing-table, composed with great care a letter of many pages. The hours passed as she wrote and rewrote, and glancing at the clock before the end was reached, she saw that it was already past eleven. Then she hurried. The division at this moment was being taken. Within the hour Harry would have returned; and indeed she had only just folded her letter in its envelope when his step sounded in the hall. She heard the door open and shut. He was in the room. But she kept her head bowed over her letter lest her face should betray her over much. Nor for a moment did she speak, since she did not quite trust her voice. It was Harry who spoke first. "You have come back? I did not expect you so soon."