“Is that so?  I’m sorry to hear it,” remarked the other in the conventional tone in which Adams’ friends always spoke of Connie.  “Well, I’ll walk a block or two with you in your direction,” he added as they turned toward Broadway.  “Laura told me, by the way, that she was so fortunate as to have a glimpse of you this morning.”

Adams nodded and then looked quickly away from the other’s searching eyes.  “Yes, we met rather early in the street,” he responded; “she seems to me to be looking very well, and yet she’s altered, somehow—­I can’t say exactly how or where.”

“Then you’ve noticed it,” returned Mr. Wilberforce, with a sigh, and he asked almost immediately:  “Does she appear to you to be happier than she was?”

“Happier?  Well, perhaps, but I hardly analysed the impression she produced.  There was a change in her, that was all I saw.”

“Did she speak to you, I wonder, of her book?”

Adams laughed softly.  “She spoke of it to say that she was tired of it,” he answered, “but that is only the inevitable reaction of youth—­it’s a part of the universal rhythm of thought, nothing more.”

Mr. Wilberforce shook his head a little doubtfully.  “I wish I could feel so confident,” he returned, while a quick impatience—­almost a contempt awoke in Adams’ mind.  Was it possible that this man beside him, with his white hairs, his blanched skin, his benign old-world sentiments, was, like Trent, a mere worshipper of the literary impulse in its outward accomplishment?  Did he love the poet in the woman rather than the woman in the poet?  As Adams turned to look at him, he thought, not without a certain grim humour, that he beheld another victim to the vice of sentimentality; and in his mental grouping he placed his companion among those who, like Connie, were in bondage to the images of their imaginations.

“And yet even if she should cease to write poems she will always live one,” he added lightly.

“Yes, she will still be herself,” agreed Mr. Wilberforce, but his words carried no conviction of comfort; and when he turned at the corner to take his car, it was with the air of a man oppressed by the weight of years.

When Adams reached home he found Connie, dressed in her blue velvet with the little twinkling aigrette, on the point of starting for an afternoon drive with her nurse in the Park.  The events of the night had been entirely effaced from her mind by the newer interests of the day; and as he looked at her in amazement, it seemed to him that she bore a greater resemblance to the rosy girl he had first loved than she had done for many weary and heart-sick months.  When he left her, presently, to go back to his office, it was with a feeling of hopefulness which entered like an infusion of new blood into his veins.  The relapse might have been, after all, less serious than he had at first believed, and Connie’s cure might become soon not only a beautiful dream, but an accomplished