"Particularly as he may change his mind if I keep him waiting long!" she laughed; and with a little caressing touch to her mother's cheek, she went down to the living-room. Lorraine was standing with his back to the fireplace, nervously drawing his gloves back and forth through his fingers. He came forward and offered her his hand--and after just a second's hesitation, she touched it momentarily. It was as though she said: "As the hostess, I cannot do less, but I don't in the least fancy the doing." "Will you sit down, Mr. Lorraine?" she said perfunctorily, letting herself sink into a chair with the lithe grace he remembered so well. She was perfectly at ease--with the air of one who entertains a casual visitor. She looked at him, politely interrogatively, and waited for him to begin. It was his move, and she did not intend to help him in the least. Lorraine was not so tranquil--his agitation showed in his slightly flushed face and in his manner. He took out his handkerchief and passed it across his lips. When he did speak he knew it was with an effort and unnaturally. "Stephanie," he said, "I want to apologize for what I did at the Club-house, and what I said yesterday--will you let me?" "Certainly," she replied impersonally. "An apology is one thing that you can tender and one thing that I can accept." "It does not right the injury----" he began. "No, it does not right it," she concurred. "Any more than your apology will right the injury you have done me," he added. "And mine was the greater injury," she observed. "I know it. There is no apology I can offer that will be effective--so, why try?" "Don't try!" he exclaimed. "Just let us forget it, and take a fresh start." He leaned forward and took her hand--and she, in sheer amazement, suffered him to retain it. "I am willing to forgive, Stephanie, if you are willing to come back to me. Will you do it, dear?" For a moment she had the impulse to ask how long this notion had actuated him, and how long he thought that it would last. Then the keen injustice of the taunt came home to her, and with it a sharp sense of just what such an offer meant from _him_. Aside from everything--of blindness when he should have seen, of supineness when he should have acted, of vacillation when he should have known his own mind, of all the other deficiencies of which he was guilty--there yet remained the ever present, ever damning fact that _she_ was a guilty wife; and that he was willing to overlook the past, and to restore her to the place she once had, made all his shortcomings as nothing in comparison. It mattered not how soon he might again change his mind--that was not the present question. He had offered. He was waiting for her answer. She had but to accept--and the thing was done beyond the fear of change. "Will you do it, Stephanie, dear?" she heard him say again--she did not know how often he had said it.