Outwardly she appeared at ease, well-poised and unruffled. Only the quick rise and fall of her bosom and the tremulousness of her hands gave any sign of her inner agitation. “Why—Frank!” cried Durkin, with eloquent enough inadequacy, his face paling a little, for all his own assumption of easy fortitude. He continued to look at her, a sudden lump in his throat choking back the hundred stampeding words that seemed clamoring to escape. He noticed, as he had so often noticed before, how rapid and easy were her movements, and how, through all her softness, she impressed one with a sense of her great muscular agility. For one wavering moment she let her eyes lose their studied calmness, and, inwardly surrendering, gazed at him recklessly, abandonedly, with her very soul in her face. “Is it safe here?” she murmured, as she drew her chair up. He nodded. “As safe as anywhere,” he was on the point of replying, but did not speak the words. “Dearest!” she whispered to him, with her eyes still on his face, and her back to the crowded room. He tried to seize her ungloved hand in his, but she drew him up with a sudden monitory “Hsssssh!” Then he, too, remembered, and they took up their rôle of outward indifference once more. “I had to come back, you see!” she confessed, with what seemed a shamed and mournful shake of the head. “Something told me you would, all along, even after your first letter. I saw it, as surely as I see you now!” “Oh, Jim, what I wrote you was true!—it showed me that we can’t bury our past, in a day, or a week or a month! It’s made me afraid of myself and taught me how weak I am!” And again she looked at him, across the quiet but abysmal gulf of her reawakening despair. “But there is just where we make ourselves so unhappy—we’re so afraid about being afraid! Life without some fear—what is it?” “Oh, I am without defence!” she lamented, indeterminately and inconsequently. She sighed again, and still again gazed into his face with her shadowy and unhappy and seemingly hungry eyes. Then, with a sudden abandoning uptoss of her reckless hands, that seemed to fling both solemnity and memory from her, she laughingly declared that it was already too late to cry over spilt milk. Yet the sound of her careless laughter fell, in some way, more lugubriously on Durkin’s ear than had all her earlier lamentation. “But _why_ did you ever write that first letter?” he persisted. She knew she could not explain, satisfactorily. “It was the result of being lonesome, let’s say, and perhaps being morbid, after my illness!” Durkin called the waiter and gave him an order, puffing his cigar with assumed unconcern, while the woman murmured across the table to him: “You look quite foreign, with that magnificent Vandyke! And, by the way, how do you like my English bang?” “Why, it’s dyed!” said Durkin, for the first time missing the sunny glint in the familiar crown of chestnut.