And now fear crept in—­fear that he had forgotten, had changed.  Else how could he have spoken so? . . .  And the tempered restraint of her quivered at the thought—­all the serenity, the confidence in life and in him began to waver.  And her first doubt crept in upon her.

She turned her expressionless face from him and, resting her cheek against the velvet back of the chair, looked out into the late afternoon sunshine.

All the long autumn without him, all her long, lonely, leisure hours in the golden weather, his silence, his withdrawal into himself, and his work, hitherto she had not misconstrued, though often she confused herself in explaining it.  Impatience of his absence, too, had stimulated her to understand the temporary state of things—­to know that time away from him meant for her only existence in suspense.

Very, very slowly, by degrees imperceptible, alone with memories of him and of their summer’s happiness already behind her, she had learned that time added things to what she had once considered her full capacity for affection.

Alone with her memories of him, at odd moments during the day—­often in the gay clamour and crush of the social routine—­or driving with Nina, or lying, wide-eyed, on her pillow at night, she became conscious that time, little by little, very gradually but very surely, was adding to her regard for him frail, new, elusive elements that stole in to awake an unquiet pulse or stir her heart into a sudden thrill, leaving it fluttering, and a faint glow gradually spreading through her every vein.

She was beginning to love him no longer in her own sweet fashion, but in his; and she was vaguely aware of it, yet curiously passive and content to put no question to herself whether it was true or false.  And how it might be with him she evaded asking herself, too; only the quickening of breath and pulse questioned the pure thoughts unvoiced; only the increasing impatience of her suspense confirmed the answer which now, perhaps, she might give him one day while the blessed world was young.

At the thought she moved uneasily, shifting her position in the chair.  Sunset, and the swift winter twilight, had tinted, then dimmed, the light in the room.  On the oak-beamed ceiling, across the ivory rosettes, a single bar of red sunlight lay, broken by rafter and plaster foliation.  She watched it turn to rose, to ashes.  And, closing her eyes, she lay very still and motionless in the gray shadows closing over all.

He had not yet spoken when again she lifted her eyes and saw him sitting in the dusk, one arm resting across his knee, his body bent slightly forward, his gaze vacant.