Wyant frowned. "Nothing to be done about it--in Lita's case? I hope you don't mean that. My son--God, if ever a man has slaved for a woman, made himself a fool for her..." Heuston's dry voice cut the diatribe. "Well, sir, you wouldn't deprive him of man's peculiar privilege: the right to make a fool of himself?" Wyant sank back grumbling among his cushions. "I don't understand you, any of you," he said, as if secretly relieved by the admission. "Well, Exhibit dear, strictly speaking you don't have to. We're old enough to run the show for ourselves, and all you've got to do is to look on from the front row and admire us," said Nona, bending to him with a caress. In the street she found herself walking silently at Heuston's side. These weekly meetings with him at Wyant's were becoming a tacit arrangement: the one thing in her life that gave it meaning. She thought with a smile of her mother's affirmation that everything always came out right if only one kept on being brave and trustful, and wondered where, under that formula, her relation to Stanley Heuston could be fitted in. It was anything but brave--letting herself drift into these continual meetings, and refusing to accept their consequences. Yet every nerve in her told her that these moments were the best thing in life, the one thing she couldn't do without: just to be near him, to hear his cold voice, to say something to provoke his disenchanted laugh; or, better still, to walk by him as now without talking, with a furtive glance now and then at his profile, ironic, dissatisfied, defiant--yes, and so weak under the defiance... The fact that she judged and still loved showed that her malady was mortal. "Oh, well--it won't last; nothing lasts for our lot," she murmured to herself without conviction. "Or at the worst it will only last as long as I do; and that's a date I can fix as I choose." What nonsense, though, to talk like that, when all those others needed her: Jim and his silly Lita, her father, yes, even her proud self-confident father, and poor old Exhibit A and her mother who was so sure that nothing would ever go wrong again, now she had found a new Healer! Yes; they all needed help, though they didn't know it, and Fate seemed to have put her, Nona, at the very point where all their lives intersected, as a First-Aid station is put at the dangerous turn of a race-course, or a points-man at the shunting point of a big junction. "Look here, Nona: my dinner-engagement was a fable. Would the heavens fall if you and I went and dined somewhere by ourselves, just as we are?" "Oh, Stan--" Her heart gave a leap of joy. In these free days, when the young came and went as they chose, who would have believed that these two had never yet given themselves a stolen evening? Perhaps it was just because it was so easy. Only difficult things tempted Nona, and the difficult thing was always to say "No."