and he asked me to come back and tell her. Just say it’s Mr. Loveman calling again.”

The girl spoke through the telephone as directed; then, “You’re to go right up.”

Tingling with suspense, Clifford shot up to the twelfth floor and rang the bell of Apartment M. The door was promptly opened, and without waiting for the maid to cry a warning because of this suddenly altered Mr. Loveman, Clifford walked quickly past her through a little hallway into a sitting-room. At a window, looking down into the Avenue stood a[38] slender figure in a gown of gold-brown chiffon velvet, softly touched with fur. She was Mary Regan.

[38]

“Sit down, Mr. Loveman,” she said, not turning. And then after a pause she added a bit impatiently, but in that distant, composed tone she had so often used toward him in other days: “Well, what else is there? Haven’t I already promised to follow your instructions in every detail?”

Clifford did not reply, and his silence caused her to turn. At sight of him the tint of autumn rose left her dark face.

“Mr. Clifford!” she breathed.

“Good-afternoon—” He hesitated; the last time he had spoken to her, six months before, he had called her Mary. “Good-afternoon, Miss Regan.”

And then the fear that was in him caused him quickly to add, “Or should I say Mrs. Gardner?”

“I am still Mary Regan.” She moved nearer. “You here! The name you sent up was Mr. Loveman.”

“I used Mr. Loveman’s name because I thought if I sent my own you would refuse to see me.”

“Why?”

He had searched her out primarily to learn the danger she was in and to save her from it, but here he was in the first moment speaking of himself. “I reasoned that you did not want to see me from the fact that you have been in town a week and have sent me no word. And I thought, after your promise—”

[39]He could not finish. She motioned him to be seated, herself took a chair, and there was a moment’s pause. Pale, a strained composure in her face, she was wondrously striking in the gold-brown velvet with its margin of fur; she seemed to have matured, yet to have grown no older; and never before had she seemed more poignantly desirable to him. 

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