Cally smiled into space and answered:  “At times.”

“That’s cheerful ...  When there’s not been an hour for me, all summer, I swear it, that hasn’t been singing with thoughts of you.”

“You might have run up from Trouville, in July, and called on us in Paris.”

His reply indicated that running, whether up or down, involved a considerable conquest of pride.  And Cally understood that.

“I,” said she, tranquilly, “have been growing weary of society.  Perhaps that is your doing....”

She told him of her experience at the Settlement yesterday, of her rebuff at the hands of Mr. Pond.  Canning thanked heaven that she need not bother herself with such dreary faddisms of the day.

“You can safely leave all that,” said he, “to the women who have failed in their own careers.”

“And what career is that?”

“The career of being a woman.  Need you ask?”

Carlisle, drawing on her gloves, observed:  “That would bring up the question, wouldn’t it, of what your ideal of a woman is.”

“For five cents,” said Hugo, “I will tell you her name.”

She was pleased with the evidences of her mastery over him.  The day of intimacy brought its reactions, automatically creating romantic airs.  When the time came for him to go, she was sorry; and perhaps just a little uncertain in her own mind.  For the re-engagement had still not taken place.  The most that could be said was that an “understanding” existed, to the effect that it would take place on his return.  And Canning, for his part, was not dissatisfied with this arrangement.  In ten days he would come again, and take the wavering outposts by storm.

They said good-bye in the drawing-room at home, at quarter before five.  Cally held out her slender little hand.  Hugo smiled down at it:  surely, between him and her, an odd farewell.  But then, as his clasp tightened, the man’s smile became a little twisted on his handsome lip.

“When I part from you again, my dear,” said he, with sudden huskiness, “I swear it won’t be like this.”

The girl looked up at him.  He raised the hand, palm-upward, with a sort of jerk, kissed it, dropped it abruptly, and was gone.

Cally remained standing where he had left her; this time she did not run to the window.  She glanced at the hand which her lover had just saluted, and was conscious of a subtle want in their reunion....

Hugo’s presence in the body had brought up vividly that matter upon which they had broken in May.  Of that matter he had said nothing, either yesterday or to-day.  His manner and bearing took the clear position that he and she had simply had a lovers’ quarrel, in which both had said and done things that they did not mean.  But Jack Dalhousie had stood in the background of Carlisle’s mind all day, and her feeling was that something rather definite should have been said about him.  Possibly Mrs. Berkeley Page had something to do with this; that lady had left behind her an indefinable suggestion of invisible standards, of appraisements differing from mamma’s, say.  Measuring herself unconsciously with Hugo to-day, Cally had become aware that in carrying out her will in opposition to his last year, she had derived, not merely strategic, but in some way personal, strength.  The old inequality had mysteriously disappeared....