The five days passed in a flash; and when the last one came, it brought to Margaret Ransom an hour of weakness, of profound disorganization, when old barriers fell, old convictions faded—­when to be alone with him for a moment became, after all, the one craving of her heart.  She knew he was coming that afternoon to say “good-by”—­and she knew also that Ransom was to be away at South Wentworth.  She waited alone in her pale little drawing- room, with its scant kakemonos, its one or two chilly reproductions from the antique, its slippery Chippendale chairs.  At length the bell rang, and her world became a rosy blur—­through which she presently discerned the austere form of Mrs. Sperry, wife of the Professor of palaeontology, who had come to talk over with her the next winter’s programme for the Higher Thought Club.  They debated the question for an hour, and when Mrs. Sperry departed Margaret had a confused impression that the course was to deal with the influence of the First Crusade on the development of European architecture—­but the sentient part of her knew only that Dawnish had not come.

He “bobbed in,” as he would have put it, after dinner—­having, it appeared, run across Ransom early in the day, and learned that the latter would be absent till evening.  Margaret was in the study with her husband when the door opened and Dawnish stood there.  Ransom—­who had not had time to dress—­was seated at his desk, a pile of shabby law books at his elbow, the light from a hanging lamp falling on his grayish stubble of hair, his sallow forehead and spectacled eyes.  Dawnish, towering higher than usual against the shadows of the room, and refined by his unusual pallor, hung a moment on the threshold, then came in, explaining himself profusely—­laughing, accepting a cigar, letting Ransom push an arm-chair forward—­a Dawnish she had never seen, ill at ease, ejaculatory, yet somehow more mature, more obscurely in command of himself.

Margaret drew back, seating herself in the shade, in such a way that she saw her husband’s head first, and beyond it their visitor’s, relieved against the dusk of the book shelves.  Her heart was still—­she felt no throbbing in her throat or temples:  all her life seemed concentrated in the hand that lay on her knee, the hand he would touch when they said good-by.

Afterward her heart rang all the changes, and there was a mood in which she reproached herself for cowardice—­for having deliberately missed her one moment with him, the moment in which she might have sounded the depths of life, for joy or anguish.  But that mood was fleeting and infrequent.  In quieter hours she blushed for it—­she even trembled to think that he might have guessed such a regret in her.  It seemed to convict her of a lack of fineness that he should have had, in his youth and his power, a tenderer, surer sense of the peril of a rash touch—­should have handled the case so much more delicately.