How the time had passed for Tredennis he could not himself have told. When he had returned to Washington he had lived and moved as a man in a dream. The familiar streets and buildings wore an unfamiliar look. It was a relief to find the places more deserted than before; his chief desire was to be, if possible, entirely alone. In the first vivid freshness of his impressions it seemed incredible that the days he had been living through had come to an end, and that absolutely nothing remained but the strange memory of them. At times it appeared that something must happen,--some impossible thing which would give reality to the past and motive to the future. If in any of his nightly walks before the closed and silent house he had suddenly seen that the shutters were opened and lights were shining within; if Bertha herself had, without warning, stood at the window and smiled upon him, he would have felt it at first only natural, even though he knew she was hundreds of miles away. This for a few weeks, and then his exaltation died a gradual death for want of sustenance, and there remained only the long, sultry days to be lived through and their work to be done. They were lived through, and their work was not neglected; but there was no one of them which dragged its slow length by without leaving marks upon him which neither time nor change could erase in any future that might come. "Five months," he said, as he waited with the clamor about him, "is longer than it seems--it is longer." And Miss Jessup, passing him at the moment and looking up, found herself so utterly at a loss for an adjective adequate to the description of his expression, that her own bright and alert little countenance fell, and existence temporarily palled upon her. It was late in the day when he reached the Amorys. When he drove up several carriages stood before the door, one of them Bertha's own, from which Richard and Planefield had just descended. Two or three men were going into the house, and one or two were leaving it. Through the open door were to be seen the lighted hall, and glimpses of bright rooms beyond, from which came the sound of voices, laughter, and the clink of glass. Richard entered the house with Tredennis, and flung off his rather sumptuous outer garment with a laugh of relief. "We have made fifty calls so far," he said, "and have enjoyed them enormously. What have you accomplished?" "Not fifty, by any means," Tredennis answered, and then the man-servant took his coat, and they went into the parlors.