upon her was one of his most effective methods of impressing his individuality she did not know.  Gerty could have told her that he resorted to it invariably at the psychological instant—­and so, perhaps, could Madame Alta had she chosen to be confidential.  As a conscious or unconscious trick of manner it had served its purpose in many a place when words appeared a difficult or dangerous medium of expression—­but to Laura in her almost cloistral ignorance it was at once a revelation and an enlightenment.  When it passed from her she found that the face of the whole world was changed.

Indoors Mr. Wilberforce and Gerty Bridewell were awaiting her, but it seemed to her that her attitude toward them had grown less intimate—­that she herself, her friends, and even the ordinary surroundings of her life were different from what they had been only several hours before.  She wanted to be alone—­to retreat into herself in search of a clearer knowledge, and even her voice sounded strangely altered in her own ears.

“You look as if you had been frightened, Laura; what is it?” asked Gerty, pressing her hand.

“It is nothing,” returned Laura, with a glance; “it is only that my head aches.”  She pressed her hands upon her temples, and the throbbing of her pulses against her finger tips confirmed her words.  When, after a few sympathetic questions, they rose to go, she was aware all at once of a great relief—­a relief which seemed to her an affront to friendship so devoted as theirs.

“Roger tells me that we are to have the new book on Wednesday,” said Mr. Wilberforce, as he stood looking down upon her with the peculiar insight which belongs to the affection of age.  Then it seemed to her suddenly that he understood the cause of her disturbance and that there were both pity and disappointment in his eyes.

“I hope so,” she answered, smiling the first insincere smile of her life, for even as she uttered the words she knew that she no longer felt the old eager, consuming interest in her work, and that the making of books appeared to her an employment which was tedious and without end.  Why, she wondered vaguely, had she devoted her whole life to a pursuit in which there was so little of the pulsation of the intenser realities?  She felt at the instant as if a bandage had dropped from before her eyes, and the fact that Kemper as an individual did not enter into her thoughts in no wise lessened his tremendous moral effect upon her awakening nature.  Not one man, but life itself was making its appeal to her, and for the first time she realised something of the intoxication that might dwell in pleasure—­in pleasure accepted solely as a pursuit, as an end in and for itself alone.  Then, a moment later, standing by her desk in her room upstairs, she remembered, in an illuminating flash, the look with which Kemper had parted from her at her door.

CHAPTER III